The Prime Minister was in a pretty ratty mood at the Liaison Committee today, taking exception especially to questions from the dry-as-sandpaper chair, Andrew Tyrie. At one point Cameron told Tyrie that ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’ if he was suggesting that there weren’t people in Raqqa who were plotting to damage Britain. Later, he spoke sarcastically of Tyrie’s ‘great ability and genius’.
Why was he bristling so much? Well, Tyrie and his colleagues on the committee, which is made up of the chairs of all the parliamentary select committees, were giving Cameron a hard time on his figure of 70,000 moderate opposition forces in Syria. The Prime Minister conceded that some of them weren’t the ‘sort of people you bump into at Liberal Democrat party conference’ (not that he’s ever had the great pleasure of attending one of these gatherings, though the party’s increasing desperation to get anyone to sign up to its spring conference might tempt him into finding out what sort of people do attend these gatherings), but refused to publish the names of the groups in that 70,000 figure because it would help President Assad. He said he favoured a ‘third way between a Daesh-style state and President Assad the butcher remaining in charge of his country’.
But perhaps another reason Cameron was in a grouchy mood, besides the fact that Andrew Tyrie was addressing him a bit like a teacher at an all boys’ school might take down a bumptious teenager who is giving too much backchat, was that this kind of scrutiny is pretty unusual for him at the moment. With Labour working as an effective opposition only unto itself, Cameron may have come to expect sessions in Parliament to be rather easier than the one he was subjected to today.
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