PMQs sketch: Today’s storm of accusations

The Swiss list, or swizz list, dominated PMQs. Ed Miliband was keen to paint Cameron as the beneficiary of ‘dodgy’ donors who craftily side-stepped their tax bills and funnelled the proceeds back to Tory HQ.

The stink also enveloped Stephen Green, given a peerage by Cameron, who ran HSBC at a time when it helped millionaires to, let us say, ‘overlook their obligations to the Treasury’. Nine years back it was even suggested, by Bloomberg, that the bank had stooped to money laundering while Green was in charge. Nonsense, said his friends, the money wasn’t being laundered, just given a rinse and a whizz over with the iron.

In the Commons today a storm of accusations flew. The miscreants on the list were dodgers, evaders, cheats and so on. Defamation rules lapse at the doors of Parliament so MPs can speak interchangeably of ‘avoidance’ and ‘evasion’. The rest of us have to observe a fine legal distinction.