Lloyd Evans

Boris Johnson came up early in PMQs. The Cabinet’s new ‘shadow chancellor’ has called for extra money – five billion quid – to be lavished on the NHS. Jeremy Corbyn asked Mrs May if she agreed. She dustily replied that the real chancellor had promised more than five billion last autumn. He’d pledged six! Six billion didn’t satisfy Mr Corbyn. He called the Prime Minister out by cutting her pledge in half and subtracting £200m. This gave £2.8bn which, he, said, had been ‘spread like thin gruel over two years.’ Good word, gruel. Evocative of prison-hulks and Dickensian poor-houses. It adds colour to Labour’s dream-picture of the Tories as a set of stuck-up, over-privileged, fox-hunting tramp-stranglers.

Carillion. It doesn’t help that the name resembles a kiddie’s word, like gazillion, suggesting an astronomical sum of cash. The sudden death of this lumbering giant gave Mr Corbyn an easy route to victory at PMQs. He didn’t take it. Corbyn outlined Carillion’s recent woes: the collapsing share-price, the short positions taken by hedge-funds, the profit warnings.   This seemed to amuse Philip Hammond. ‘Profit warnings?’ he muttered audibly, ‘companies issue profit warnings all the time.’ An odd boast for a chancellor to make. Mr Corbyn’s performance lacked bite and precision. He simply rambled his way through a long description of the government’s conduct.

Have you noticed the temperature? It’s got weirdly balmy all of a sudden. And the forecasters are predicting a spell of bikini weather over the festive period. By Boxing Day, we’ll be tippling iced cocktails to take the edge off the muggy gusts breezing up from the tropics. This is bad news for the energy companies. And it’s even worse for Labour MPs who love a winter breakdown in the NHS. The party’s crisis-profiteers are praying for icy blizzards and vicious gales chiselling down from the frozen north. They were hard at it today. Jeremy Corbyn assumed a gloating tone when he asked Mrs May about underfunding, missed targets and other symptoms of ‘the crisis’.

Simple result at PMQs. Mrs May won without trying. Mr Corbyn lost in the same way. Even at his most animated, the Labour leader sounds like a second-hand appliance being tested by repairmen. Sometimes he’s a Hoover, sometimes a food-blender, sometimes a wood-sander grumbling away in a garden-shed. Today’s noise was the faint, ruminative drone of an electric toothbrush. He hunched over the despatch box, his jaw slack, his head down. His words dropped from his lips like scraps of dry parchment. It seemed he was addressing all his remarks to his socks. This did not work in his favour. The game-plan today was to portray the prime minister as a sadistic landlady who enjoys evicting hungry orphans on Christmas Eve.

Ah the joys of political marriages. Theresa May’s pact with the DUP bolstered her at PMQs today, and she delivered her most assured performance since the election. Having an ally who secretly hates you is the ultimate liberation, as David Cameron discovered with the LibDems. May is free to flourish the ultimate get-out clause any time: ‘Them lot made me do it,’ is the best excuse in Westminster. And the DUP are a pretty formidable outfit. Grouped en masse around the microphone they look like a pack of concrete gnomes designed to halt a speeding tank. The Easter Island statues would probably deliver a softer Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn had a huge task today. When the government is teetering, the pressure on the opposition leader is enormous. And what a day this was.

The PM is in the middle-east on her ‘strong and stable leadership’ tour. Replacing her at PMQs stood Damian Green, a hesitant, avuncular figure who seems ill-suited to front-line politics. He’s uncomfortably tall, and he dips his chin as he speaks to make his troubled, slender jowls less conspicuous. His hair has quit the fray and left a dignified grassless dome as its memorial. His demeanour is all antiquarian gentleness. He might be the head of parchments at a museum of medical history. How he reached the cabinet is a mystery. His opponent, Emily Thornberry, is a resourceful court-room performer who started the session by getting the jury (that is, us,) on her side with a few self-deprecating jokes.

Odd-looking chap, the chancellor. Give him a moustache and a top hat and he could be Neville Chamberlain. Or a funeral director. With his stooping frame and his watchful hook-nosed features he has the air of a vulture about to feast on carrion. But he struck a kindlier note at the Budget as he set out his vision of a thrusting, modern economy. ‘Every one of our citizens,’ he trilled, ‘can contribute to – and share in – the benefits of prosperity.’ The UK, he said, ‘is a beacon of creativity, a civilised and tolerant place that cares for the vulnerable and nurtures the talented.’ Was he practising a voice-over for a housing development in paradise?

Angela Eagle, as befits her oxymoronic name, looks like a cherub and attacks like a raptor. Today her outfit was deceptively mumsy. A no-nonsense jacket, a sky-blue sweater, an arc of pearls, like a smile, laid across her breast-bone. Eagle is the mistress of the poisoned barb and she’d been whittling away at her missile all morning. Up she got and let fly. Her aim was true, her weighting perfect. ‘In June, the prime minister told the country she was the only person who could offer strong and stable leadership. With her cabinet crumbling before her eyes, can she tell us how it’s going?’ And nothing happened. Or barely anything. The gales of hilarity that usually greet Ms Eagle’s questions failed to materialise.

Bit of a rum PMQs. The evolving sexual scandals cast a pall over proceedings. Up first, Dennis Skinner, who revealed the truth about HS2. It’s a wicked plot to treat northerners as ‘second class citizens’. He said that tunnels are to account for 30 per cent of the southern route but only 2 per cent of the northern bits. Selectively-educated Mr Skinner knows perfectly well that this is about economics. A Home Counties property costs more than its northern counterpart so burrowing under a house is cheaper than sending an express train through the master-bedroom. But perhaps he’s got a point. Couldn’t HS2 be entirely subterranean? Effectively this would mean extending the London Underground from Euston to Edinburgh.  Not a bad idea.