Nadhim Zahawi is toast – and PMQs proved it

God. What a grisly PMQs. Last week, Sir Keir Starmer politicised the case of an NHS patient who died before an ambulance could save her. Today he tried to make a political point about a murder. ‘It’s hard to convey the agony they’ve been through,’ he said of a meeting with the victim’s family, ‘They say the government has blood on its hands.’

Poor taste. And poor tactics. His real aim today was to destabilise the forgetful minister, Nadhim Zawahi. By using a family’s grief as a warm-up act, he created a gruesomely funereal mood – when he turned to Tory sleaze it seemed stagey and opportunistic. 

Zahawi is the keen-as-mustard member for Stratford-upon-Avon who refers to the Bard as, ‘my constituent, William Shakespeare.’ Although he joined the low-tax party, it seems he overdid things. Millions have been repaid. Many questions have yet to be settled.