True romance

‘Any closer and they’ll start kissing,’ said Cameron. The PM and his beloved chancellor were seated side by side at PMQs today, chatting showily throughout. Their rhubarb-rhubarb conversation was intended to quell the rumours of civil war in Downing Street. The ploy misfired. Two men conversing don’t both speak at each other simultaneously. But that scarcely mattered. The session was the rowdiest and least illuminating of the year so far. At times it was noisier than the Pamplona bull-run.

Cameron began by trying to elicit answers about the appalling mortality rates at Staffordshire Hospital. Brown adopted his cenotaph grimace and reeled off a list of inquiries, investigations and disciplinary sanctions which parked the issue in neutral territory. Then Cameron turned to the happier ground of the cabinet blood-bath. He asked Brown to repeat this statement before the house. ‘I would never instruct anybody to do anything other than support my chancellor’.