The grudge-mongers were out in force at PMQs

Grievance fever gripped the house at Prime Minister’s Questions. The grudge-mongers were out in force. Sir Keir Starmer led the charge and asked Rishi Sunak why he refused to scrap non-dom status.

The Labour leader answered his own question by explaining that the tax exemption enriches Rishi’s ‘family’. (By ‘family’ he meant ‘wife’, of course, and the encryption helped him dodge the charge that he’s turning Mrs Sunak into a public hate-figure – which is exactly what he’s doing.)

Sir Keir expects us to envy and loathe the Sunaks for being successful. But a lot of people loathe anyone who loathes success. Perhaps Sir Keir should enlarge his social circle.

Liz Savile Roberts dazzled the house with a hairdo of bubblegum pink. But her mind was aggressively focused on the route of HS2 which, to her intense dismay, will link southern and northern England. Meanwhile in Wales, she said, anyone moving from south to north by train must take a detour via Shrewsbury.

She proposed a new route, costing ‘two billion pounds’, that will spare Welsh travellers the nightmare of spending 10 minutes in Shrewsbury station. At heart, she’s complaining about two accidents of geology and history. First, Wales is hilly. Secondly, England isn’t in Wales and Wales isn’t in England. And there lies the solution. Confer on Shrewsbury a special new status as a joint-protectorate of the Welsh and English governments and Ms Savile Roberts’s problem vanishes.

But would that pacify her troubled spirit? Probably not. Some people regard every peace overture as a slap in the face.

Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the disgruntled MP for Balham, asked Rishi about the slave-trade which – like the topography of Wales – lies outside the scope of his responsibilities. Never mind. She ordered him to meet two very precise demands immediately. ‘Give a full and meaningful apology and commit to reparatory justice’.

‘No, Mr Speaker,’ came the succinct reply. The PM doesn’t want to ‘unpick history’. As for the R-word, he didn’t even mention it. A handout never solves the problem because it serves as an ineradicable reminder that the needy applicant was forced to beg for charity in the first place. And that makes needy people even angrier.

Stephen Flynn tried to paint the PM as an evil Tory bigot and asked about ‘safe and legal routes’ available to child refugees from Sudan claiming asylum in the UK. Note the use of ‘child’ to add emotional heft to his question.

Rishi went all patriotic on him and boasted of Britain’s willingness to receive asylum-seekers in their droves. And he let slip the aid budget to Sudan over the last five years. A quarter of a billion pounds. So the chaos erupting in Africa is partly due to the corrupting effects of the aid myth. Squirting free cash at failed states accelerates their failure.