Westminster plays recall tennis

Now that David Cameron has returned from his Portuguese fish-shopping exploits, the game of recall tennis that Westminster has been playing for the past few days has stepped up a few notches. Now it’s not just Philip Hammond, Michael Fallon and other Cabinet members leaving COBR meetings who can be asked whether or not they think Parliament should return from recess to debate the situation in Iraq, but the Prime Minister himself. It’s running like this: another Tory MP writes to the Prime Minister to say there should be a recall, or a senior party figure from the Lib Dems or Labour says there should be one. The ball lands in the government court, and the government bats it back out again, saying, as David Cameron did this afternoon, that there is no need for a recall because ‘this is a humanitarian operation that Britain is involved in’.