Labour fails to turn up to work for Treasury questions

The Commons is pretty quiet at the moment, draining of energy earlier and earlier in the week as MPs head out to their constituencies. So quiet, in fact, that Labour seems to have given up on using departmental question times as a forum for making government ministers uncomfortable or piling any political pressure on their opposite numbers.

Yesterday’s Work and Pensions Questions were pretty lacklustre from an opposition attack point of view, but today’s Treasury questions were far worse. Tory MPs had turned up with piles of sickly sweet loyal questions to ask, most running along the lines of ‘is the Chancellor aware that he’s doing a fantastic job?’ The minister responding then rewarded the most loyal backbenchers by describing them as a ‘champion’ of business in their constituency, which the Labour frontbench found very amusing until their own Steve McCabe started talking about the ‘long-term economic plan’, which earned him the same title.