The titans clashed over Leveson, and nobody cared

I got lost about two minutes into PMQs today. Or maybe sooner. Jeremy Hunt’s in trouble over that old business again. And Baroness Warsi has breached the ministerial code but hasn’t resigned. So Ed Miliband wanted to know why Warsi has been referred to someone or other and Hunt hasn’t. And David Cameron said it was because of the Leveson inquiry. And Miliband said no, it can’t be because of Leveson because Leveson has nothing do with it. And Leveson has said that Leveson has nothing do with it. And that’s when I lost track of who had, or hadn’t, been reported to this person, or that inquiry, about this blunder or that breach of this guidance or that code. It was wonks-only stuff.
 
Things became clearer when Miliband turned to the BSkyB bid and to a letter sent by Jeremy Hunt to the PM on Nov 19th. The text of this illuminating document, according to Miliband, casts Mr Hunt as a corrupt, slippery, lying and self-centred elitist. But the very same letter, according to Mr Cameron — quoting different bits of it, of course — reveals Mr Hunt to be the wisest the noblest legislator to bestride the earth since Cato the Elder.
 
The two leaders tussled over the text like two skeletal divinity scholars debating an abstruse detail of Aramaic scripture. And nobody cared.
 
Eventually Miliband stopped enquiring into inquiries and started talking about the Tory whips instead. He’d got his hands on a memo urging rowdier and wilder hooliganism from Conservatives MPs at prime minister’s questions. The whips want ‘a protective wall of sound’. And the caterwauling mustn’t ‘dry up’ half way through. ‘Please show sufficient stamina for the full half-hour,’ they begged.
 
Poor things. All that effort. And so little time to recover before lunch-time as well.
 
But it was Labour’s backbenchers who did most of the damage today. To their own side. Tristram Hunt, a historian with a weak grasp of recent history, described Jeremy Hunt’s relationship with News Corp as ‘a cosy club at the top making decisions in their own interests.’
 
‘What a lot of brass neck!’ pouted Cameron angrily. ‘Under Labour we had 13 years of pyjama parties, christenings and sucking up!’
 
Gloria De Piero fired off one of those killer quickie-questions. NHS walk-in centres, she said, are closing in her Ashfield constituency. Why? Well, said Cameron, not because of me. The government has boosted the health budget when Labour called the increase ‘irresponsible’. Every viewer at home could see Cameron’s answer coming. It’s baffling that professional politicians can’t find better ways to test their opponents.
 
Alison Seabeck asked a much tougher question. Her constituents in Plymouth are relying more and more on food banks as a result of benefit cuts. This could be an embarrassment to the Coalition — forcing citizens onto the soup-run — but Ms Seabeck was overcome with nerves and she fluffed her lines. Then she fluffed them again. She burbled on and on and began to look like a tongue-tied chambermaid trying to ask the lady mayoress if she wants her bed turned down. Eventually she blurted out this weird line. ‘Is the prime minister going to say food banks are wonderful?’
 
Cameron replied with glib praise for the food bank operators. This insincere answer seemed to provoke Steve Rotherham, (Liverpool Walton) who resembles an ageing Beatle with his puffy, crimson face, his long rabbity overbite, and his crop of dark hair brushed stylishly forwards. When roused to anger, Mr Rotherham looks as if he’s won a competition to play the Bolshie Scouser in a pageant of British stereotypes. Today he was spitting with fury. He laid into the prime minister and accused him of wreaking economic havoc while having no strategy at all.
 
‘Have you run out of steam!?’ he shouted, full of steam himself. It was pure theatrics of course. Calling the prime minister ‘you’ in the house is a sign that you’re so mad about everything that you’re prepared to violate parliamentary protocol. That’s how bad it is. You may even have to get yourself slung out into the corridor too.
 
Cameron replied by inviting Mr Rotherham to join one of Michael Gove’s new poetry recital classes for infants.
 
That was supremely rude. And therefore supremely gratifying to Mr Rotherham. He’ll boast of this put-down till the end of his days.