PMQs Sketch: The high horse comes out cantering

PMQs kicked off with a big fuss about improvements to our world-beating education system. To academise or not to academise? Corbo wants to let good-or-outstanding schools be good-or-outstanding. Cameron says good-or-outstanding schools can become even more good-or-outstanding. Both leaders prefer to ignore Ofsted’s lower grades, ‘inadequate’, and ‘requires improvement’. Rightly so. No one else recognises these cold and impersonal classifications. The average citizen uses a system based on the sight of a uniformed teenager on the street. ‘Safe to ignore’, ‘pass with caution’, ‘armed and feral’ or ‘requires imprisonment’.

Today’s exchanges were marked by moral panic and an outbreak of high-horse fever. Cameron started it with a premeditated dig at anti-Semites in opposition circles. Labour’s deportation expert, Naz Shah, wants to pacify the middle-east by airlifting Israel and dropping it off in America. Shah has apologised for her remarks and she invites our sympathy by stating that she was ‘shocked’ by her own words.