Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs sketch: Dave gloats in front of Saint Hattie

Poor old Labour. They’re still so crushed by the election result that they put up dead-parrot Harriet Harman against Cameron every Wednesday. Why not let the leadership candidates use him for target practice instead?

PMQs is sometimes a contest of ideas and sometimes a contest of insults. Today it was a contest of moral registers. Harman asked about the EU referendum and Cameron scoffed at her colleagues for voting en bloc for a referendum they’ve opposed for five long years. ‘The biggest mass conversion since that Chinese general baptised his troops with a hose pipe.’

Harman was off. She scrambled to the top of Sanctimony Hill and delivered a sermon on the mount. Cameron was the prime minister, she conceded. ‘He won the election. He doesn’t need to do the ranting and sneering and gloating. He can just answer the question. He should show a bit more class.’

Fat chance. Cameron is a pugilist by instinct and training, and he regards the label ‘attack-dog’ as a far higher accolade than ‘statesman’.

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