Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn have just faced one another in the Commons for the first time in this new Parliament, though it is highly unlikely to be the last. The pair were responding to the election of the new Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, and both chose to use their statements to make a few remarks about the election itself.
Naturally, Johnson was greeted with a huge cheer from his MPs when he rose, and told the Speaker that ‘I mean absolutely no disrespect to those who are no longer with us – but I think this Parliament is a vast improvement on its predecessor’. He then promised that ‘this Parliament is not going to waste the time of the nation in deadlock and division and delay’, and that on Friday MPs would vote on the Withdrawal Agreement Bill. He joked that even the Speaker’s pet parrot (called Boris) would by now be able to repeat the promise to ‘get Brexit done’, adding that ‘we are going to get on with delivering on the priorities of the British people, transforming the NHS, investing massively in education, in police, uniting and levelling up across the country and across the UK’.
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