Lloyd Evans

Rishi Sunak missed PMQs to attend Betty Boothroyd’s funeral and a half-empty chamber watched the deputies, Dominic Raab and Angela Rayner, slug it out. Rayner, always a crowd-pleaser, began by hailing the late Paul O’Grady as ‘a true northern star.’ And she had fun with the new crackdown on street thuggery or ‘anti-social behaviour’ as our genteel government puts it. Rayner linked this to the Dominic ‘Raabspierre’ allegations made by a handful of snowflake civil servants who felt that the Justice Secretary had mistreated them. It was good knockabout stuff. Rayner suggested that Raab had personal knowledge of louts ‘exploding in fits of rage and creating a culture of fear, and maybe even, I don’t know, throwing things?’ Raab guessed this was coming.

PMQs drove up a cul-de-sac today. Sir Keir’s team of researchers have discovered a crime blackspot where ten houses have been burgled in the last 18 months, but only one of these offences has ended up in court. This delighted Sir Keir as it gave him a chance to remind the world that he once worked as a prosecutor. Even better, the benighted cul-de-sac happens to be in Yorkshire where Rishi Sunak’s constituency is located. Crime dominated the session because Sir Keir brought up Baroness Casey’s end-of-term report on the London police force. The cops have fluffed it, according to the baroness, and their ranks are now overflowing with sexists, racists and homophobes.

Jeremy Hunt was designed to exclude unnecessary body movements. Tall and gaunt, his demeanour faintly bird-like, he worked through his Budget statement at a steady pace, sipping regularly from a tumbler of water. Or was it vodka? No, it was water, of course. Hunt has the air of someone who always waits for the green man to flash before crossing the road. And every library book he has ever borrowed came back on time. At the despatch box he wore a Davos costume: white shirt, bland tie, midnight blue suit with no badges or political emblems attached. Is there a man alive who can project ‘anonymity’ better than Jeremy Hunt? Probably, but we’ll never know what he’s called.

Small boats could be the issue that swings the next election. Photographs of new arrivals being shuttled from beaches to free hotels is a potent symbol of a government in chaos. A country and its borders are the same thing. If the borders cease to exist, so does the country. Voters grasp this instinctively but the collective mind of parliament has failed to realise it for years. Rishi’s crackdown represents a great opportunity for him and a moral crisis for Labour. Sir Keir Starmer couldn’t find a consistent line at PMQs but he succeeded in exposing the scale of the problem.  Last year, he said, 18,000 newcomers were deemed ineligible for asylum. ‘How many have actually been returned?’ The Labour benches reverberated with finger-wagging murmurs. ‘Ah, mm, yes, good point.

A bad day for daffodils. Hundreds of these little golden trombones were cut down this morning so that our MPs could display their bogus affection for Wales. Honestly, sporting a daff on St David’s Day is like clapping for the NHS – a badge of insincerity. The issue of the moment, the Windsor Framework, barely got a mention at PMQs. Hats off to the marketing genius who coined the phrase ‘Windsor Framework’. Such a cosy, domestic and stylish term. One imagines a pine gazebo by John Lewis or a luxurious summerhouse from Habitat. A place where friends and families can relax forever. To Ulster-watchers, it’s odd that the agreement has been reached with so little acrimony. Usually when a deal is about to be done, the factions boil over with fury. Not this time.

‘Who wrote it?’ asks the Times, of Dom: The Play. I’ll let you in on a secret: it was me. If you’re selling a product, you need to advertise what you’re flogging, rather than its creator. That’s why, when my satire about Dominic Cummings launched at The Other Palace in Victoria this week, I withheld my name from the poster and the programme. Simple reason: my name doesn’t shift tickets. And a poster without the waffle is likely to cut through better. As a result, our poster has the show’s emphatic title in crimson letters beneath three shots of Dom's face taken from different angles. This has a decent chance of attracting the gaze of the fickle and easily distracted public. It’s a split-second opportunity. Shout at them. Grab their attention. ‘Dom the Play.

Small boats are becoming a big problem for Rishi. Four Tory backbenchers raised the issue at PMQs. Andrew Selous asked about a ‘much-loved’ hotel in his constituency which the Home Office has annexed on behalf of their beloved migrants. Weddings and family parties have been cancelled. Selous, rather ludicrously, asked the PM to ‘redouble his efforts’ to solve the crisis. Let’s look at the maths. Redoubling zero gives you zero. And zero is what Rishi is doing to deter the boats and send new arrivals packing. He confessed as much. The PM is campaigning to please people who loathe him Some time in the future he plans to pass a miraculous new bill aimed at bogus asylum claimants but he has little faith in its effectiveness.

PMQs looked like a comedy routine. But there was nothing funny about it. President Zelensky, AKA Uncle Volod, has come to town to address a joint session of both houses. As a warm-up act, MPs behaved like a gang of armchair Rambos and competed to fawn over Uncle Volod while pledging taxpayers’ cash to the defence of his borders. This wasn’t a debate but a scripted event staged to please a leader who appears to have no trouble travelling the world, or welcoming celebs like Boris to his capital, even though he claims to be personally locked in a life-or-death struggle with the largest country in the world. The party leaders sounded identical.‘This terrible conflict must end with the defeat of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.’ That was Sir Keir Starmer.

Gold wallpaper? All gone. That was the first big revelation of Piers Morgan’s interview with Rishi Sunak to mark the PM’s 100th day in No. 10. Every trace of Boris’s trailer-trash décor has been replaced with squeaky-clean white visuals. Piers and Rishi went head-to-head in a characterless kitchen-diner that looked like the show-home of a new-build flat in Milton Keynes. Piers got straight down to business and raised the issue that obsesses the entire nation: himself. He boasted that he’d reached No. 10 long before Rishi when he interviewed Tony Blair many years ago; he recalled that the Blairs had a singing fish nailed to the wall that crooned, ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy,’ at the touch of a button.  ‘What’s your mantra?’ he asked.

Necromancy was the main theme at PMQs. The Labour party has realised that Nadhim Zahawi’s resignation has left a gaping hole in their ‘sleazy Tories’ strategy. They badly need him back on stage. Sir Keir Starmer addressed Rishi’s fanciful claim that the rumours about Zahawi’s tax affairs were unknown to him until recent weeks. Sir Keir quoted three daily papers that mentioned Zahawi’s murky financial affairs last July. And he treated Rishi’s denials with blokeish scorn. ‘Oh come on. Anyone picking up a newspaper would have known it.’ Is it credible that Rishi knew less about Zahawi than the media, the whole of parliament and most voters? Rishi mounted a feeble defence and said he’d followed the correct procedures.

God. What a grisly PMQs. Last week, Sir Keir Starmer politicised the case of an NHS patient who died before an ambulance could save her. Today he tried to make a political point about a murder. ‘It’s hard to convey the agony they’ve been through,' he said of a meeting with the victim’s family, 'They say the government has blood on its hands.’ Poor taste. And poor tactics. His real aim today was to destabilise the forgetful minister, Nadhim Zawahi. By using a family’s grief as a warm-up act, he created a gruesomely funereal mood – when he turned to Tory sleaze it seemed stagey and opportunistic.  Rishi Sunak is the wrong man to patronise Zahawi is the keen-as-mustard member for Stratford-upon-Avon who refers to the Bard as, ‘my constituent, William Shakespeare.