‘Well this does seem like an upside down house,’ remarked Nick Gibb at Education Questions today. ‘We have the frontbench on the backbenches and the backbenches on the frontbench.’
The session was in fact rather weirder than that. It wasn’t just that Labour’s former frontbenchers such as Tristram Hunt and Lucy Powell were asking questions from a few rows back, or that Angela Rayner, the new Shadow Education Secretary, was only a few days into her new job following the appointment and swift resignation of Pat Glass. It was also that Rayner had to ask nearly all of the Opposition’s questions herself, because most of the frontbenchers sitting next to her weren’t actually part of the education frontbench team. For most of the session, Clive Lewis sat by Rayner. Lewis is Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary. He toddled out of the Chamber halfway through, leaving his colleague with Grahame Morris, who is Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Andy McDonald, who is the Shadow Transport Secretary, and Gordon Marsden, who as a Shadow Business Minister is able to ask questions on skills and 16/18 year olds.
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