Lloyd Evans

Even in her absence, Nicola Sturgeon dominated Iain Dale’s discussion with Alex Salmond and David Davis at the Edinburgh festival. Dale invited them both to comment on George Galloway’s suggestion that Sturgeon is ‘Mrs Thatcher in a kilt.’ Salmond flatly rejected this caricature. (Evidently he knows that criticising her in public will do him no favours.) Davis also dismissed the comparison. ‘Mrs Thatcher’s favourite pastime was arguing with people. Nicola wasn’t like that,’ he said, recalling the meetings he held with her during his term as Brexit secretary. ‘Nicola was very passive, very difficult to engage with. She adopted the image of a stern, domineering woman – which a lot of men like.

Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT, has never felt truly English. In conversation with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh festival, he reveals that his parents moved here from Ireland during the war and settled in the Ladbroke Grove area of London where they raised him and his four siblings. His father was ‘an archetypal Paddy’ who visited the pub six times a week including Sunday afternoons after Mass. In 1971 he went on strike for nine weeks and the family were reduced to living off jam sandwiches. His parents always referred to ‘the English’ as if they were foreigners and Lynch has never held a British passport. He’s an Irish citizen.

Ian Blackford, the SNP MP, is to stand down at the next election. And last night he gave an interview to Anand Menon of the think-tank UK In a Changing Europe. The mood was cosy, the questions as soft as marshmallows. Menon opened with the issue of independence and he allowed Blackford to change the subject from ‘process’ to ‘the kind of country Scotland will be’. Blackford stated correctly that Scotland’s status as England’s poorer neighbour encourages the best and brightest Scots to move south. And he quoted a statistic suggesting that England has benefited from Scottish inward migration in every decade since the 1850s. He outlined a solution that was strong on slogans, weak on detail.

The tectonic plates were shifting at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer asked Rishi Sunak if the total NHS waiting list of 7.2 million had risen or fallen during his nine months in office. Rishi said the number was up because striking medics are denying treatment to the people whose taxes pay for it. He suggested that Sir Keir should get work-shy doctors to accept the pay increase recommended by an independent review. The SNP can’t show delight in public – party policy forbids any display of cheerfulness or amusement They tussled over the funding of a new NHS staffing policy. Sir Keir claimed that scrapping tax exemptions for non-doms will cover the cost but Rishi had heard it all before. ‘The same policy has paid for five different things. Everyone knows I’m keen on doing maths to 18.

Blindness, ignorance and folly were on fully display at PMQs. Rishi Sunak was absent in Vilnius where he’s busy discussing with his Nato chums how to prolong or escalate the war in Ukraine. His deputy, Oliver Dowden, tried to fend off some excellent, probing questions from Labour’s Angela Rayner. She berated the Tories for overseeing a rise of 75 per cent in the number of ‘homeless children.’ Dowden replied with a feeble scripted gag. ‘Her leader says he hates tree-huggers but they’ve been very keen on hugging that magic money tree.’ Labour members howled with derision at that daft quip. Bad day for Dowden. The Alba party’s Kenny MacAskill complained about global warming which continues to ignore the shivering citizens of Scotland.

‘Hold your nerve.’ Rishi’s ill-judged advice to voters last Sunday was perhaps his worst blunder yet. At PMQs it came up half a dozen times. Sir Keir Starmer made the first attempt but he was too verbose to inflict real damage. ‘Rather than lecturing others on holding their nerve why not locate his?’ He exposed Rishi’s confused housing policy and asked if any credible expert believes that the government will reach its house-building target this year. Rishi wriggled deftly and chucked out a few helpful statistics. ‘More homes are meeting our “decent homes” standard, the housing supply is up 10 per cent... and first-time buyers are at a 20-year high.

Sir Keir Starmer had two goals at PMQs. He wanted to convince us that life is dreadful and it’s all Rishi Sunak’s fault. And he showcased a new phrase that he’d like us to spout whenever interest rates are mentioned: ‘Tory mortgage penalty.’ He used it several times which suggests that he authored it himself. Clearly it stands zero chance of working its way into our heads. But no one at Castle Starmer had the guts to tell the good knight that he’d blundered. Rishi didn’t hold back. Normally the PM glides like a swan through PMQs but today he snapped irritably at Sir Keir for failing to understand that inflation is global. ‘As ever he isn’t aware of the global macro-economics,’ he yelped.

Honours dominated the exchanges at PMQs. Sir Keir asked why the Tories have spent an entire week bickering about which Conservative deserves ennoblement. Rishi claimed that he followed ‘established convention’ in approving Boris’s lavender-list. A bit of a whopper. He clearly didn’t support the candidacy of Nadine Dorries who complained in frothing prose about the ‘sinister forces’ that denied her a peerage. Sir Keir failed to spot Rishi’s clumsy footwork and instead he pretended that the PM approved ‘Johnson’s list’ in full. ‘Too weak to block it,’ said Sir Keir. Rishi shifted tack and mentioned the peerage granted to Labour’s Tom Watson who, he said, ‘spread vicious conspiracy theories that were utterly untrue and damaged our public discourse’.