Thank God for Christmas, and a break from PMQs

Christmas at PMQs began with a call for the government to scrap its in-house astrology team. 

Greg Smith, a Tory backbencher, said he was fed up with the Office of Budget Responsibility whose latest forecast ‘was £30 billion out.’ Smith wants ‘lower taxes’ and he suggested that ‘we need a better system of financial modelling.’ In other words the OBR’s staff should be confined to a maximum security care-home for incompetent economists. He’s got a point. The OBR’s latest predictions are that Christmas Day will fall ‘in late December’ and that ‘the present decade is likely to end by 2030.’ Mind you, the OBR were right when they foresaw that Sir Keir Starmer would use at least two sham tactics at PMQs. 

First, Sir Keir estimated that 140,000 children will be homeless on Christmas Day, although does this figure include people moving house in December? It invites the obvious question: how will Sir Keir save this vast population of abandoned kiddies when he’s in power? He didn’t say.