Rebecca Long-Bailey has exposed Labour’s climate-change muddle

A festival of inertia at PMQs today. A party without a leader, a Government without a purpose and a Parliament without a programme. Theresa May, in Portsmouth for the D-Day commemorations, was understudied by David Lidington who looks like a maths professor but performs like a comedian.

His waggish streak is undermined by his gentlemanly dislike of mocking women. He blushed and giggled as he pointed out that Jeremy Corbyn’s regular deputy, Emily Thornberry, had been ‘despatched to internal exile somewhere’. Her crime, he teased, was to ‘outshine the Dear Leader’ at PMQs. In Corbyn’s place stood Rebecca Long-Bailey. Lidington warned that she too risked being ‘airbrushed out of Politburo history’ if her performance was deemed too effective.

‘He’s full of the banter today, isn’t he?’ said Long-Bailey, making her debut at PMQs. She has many talents and she knows it. Confidence, attack, a firm grip of her brief, and an easy way with a joke.