David Cameron makes a success of his Juncker failure in the Commons

Normally when Speaker Bercow drags out a statement from the Prime Minister to over an hour and a half, the PM starts to look a bit pained. Today David Cameron looked as though he’d quite like a bit more: he’d spent most of the afternoon listening to Conservatives telling him how great he is and how pleased they are with him.

It must have been an odd sensation to see MPs like John Redwood rising to congratulate him on his failure to block Jean-Claude Juncker. Some Tories went further: Stewart Jackson told the Chamber that this episode of Cameron standing up to Europe showed he had ‘lead in his pencil’ (Cameron told him, rather confusingly, that he would ‘er, let the relevant people know’). Stephen O’Brien decided to offer a definition of going over the top by telling the Chamber that he hoped ‘the Prime Minister takes inspiration from the fact that in a previous battle of Britain, we saw off many Junckers before’.