Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Is Boris a Russian agent?

(Getty)

Is Boris a Russian agent? That bizarre question occupied most of PMQs where Dominic Raab deputised for the PM while he travels abroad. The issue was raised by Angela Rayner, standing in for Keir Starmer.

She said Boris’s friend, Evgeny Lebedev, had been granted a peerage despite warnings from the security services. ‘What she suggests is nonsense,’ said Raab. She brought up a 2020 meeting between Lebedev, ‘the son of a KGB officer’, and Boris in London. ‘Details of that meeting have never been released,’ she said, as if this were proof of a massive cover-up. Oddly, she then listed the details that she claimed had been suppressed. ‘Champagne and caviar’ were on the menu, she revealed.

How did she know? Wasn’t it all hushed up? Or was she fibbing to smear the PM? That’s a bit naughty. But Speaker Hoyle took no action. He was busy scanning the backbenches for hecklers to pick fights with. Hoyle still hasn’t spotted that Tories MPs like to exploit his pedantic control freakery to disrupt PMQs and to throw unwary questioners off their rhythm. He focused on a particularly mutinous Tory.

It sounded like an offer to fight an MP in the car park. Not very classy from the Speaker

‘If you want an argument,’ said Hoyle, invoking his right to eject rebels, ‘we can argue outside – when you’re there.’ It sounded like an offer to fight an MP in the car park. Not very classy from the Speaker.

Raab took the attack to Rayner by recalling her support for Jeremy Corbyn who had opposed Britain’s membership of Nato. Hoyle sprang up again, bristling like a self-righteous cactus, and gave Raab orders to answer the question differently. ‘You can’t keep going back 12 years as a defence mechanism,’ he said.

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