John Bercow was curiously quiet at PMQs

John Bercow, parliament’s anti-bullying tsar, was strangely reticent at PMQs today. The all-but-speechless Speaker limited himself to a single intervention.

‘Order! Lots of questions to get through. And they must be heard.’

That was it. Twelve brisk words. Usually he spends several minutes bobbing up and down and screeching at MPs about the importance of behaving decorously in the chamber, and ‘conducting themselves in a statesmanlike manner’ – one of his favourite phrases. Allegations of misconduct seem to have curbed his interfering verbosity. What a relief. With no interruptions from the umpire, the session moved fast for once.

The Russian crisis has made the PM look imposingly Churchillian in the last few days. Jeremy Corbyn seems a marginalised figure. He needed to impose himself at once so he led on Stephen Hawking’s death. He decided, perhaps inadvisedly, to use the still-warm genius as a mouthpiece for Labour policy. Mr Corbyn read out this.