I don’t think I’ve ever seen David Cameron as angry as he was for that urgent question on Jeremy Hunt. He had clearly decided that attack was the best form of defence and went for his Labour critics in the most aggressive manner possible. But he did make one important concession in his opening answer when he said that if there is evidence of wrongdoing by the Culture Secretary, ‘I will not wait until the end of the Leveson inquiry to act’. In other words, Hunt’s appearance before Leveson will decide his fate.
The dynamic in the Cameron-Miliband exchanges was genuinely personal. Cameron told the House that ‘we’ve learned something about the Labour leader today and it is something he’ll regret’. For his part, Miliband claimed that Cameron was ‘incapable of doing his duty’. But it is a sign of the loss of political capital the Prime Minister has suffered in recent months that the insults he threw at Miliband did not sting as much as they once would have done.
Cameron’s anger today was not synthetic. When he sat down after his first reply to Miliband, he drained his water glass in one. By the end of the session, all the jugs of water surrounding the despatch box were empty as Cameron glugged his way through. His temper also showed when he told Dennis Skinner that he should ‘take his pension’.
The best question today, though, came from the Tory backbencher Julian Lewis, whom Cameron passed over for a ministerial job. He asked whether in ‘these cash-strapped times we are getting value for money from the independent adviser on ministerial interests’ who is being paid £30,000 a year but isn’t being asked to investigate Hunt.
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