Lloyd Evans

The bean-counters squared up in the Commons today. Chancellor Rishi Sunak delivered a terse spring statement which contained three major bombshells. And he was answered by Labour’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who unfurled a few surprises of her own. Sunak gave an upbeat assessment of Britain’s economy but warned that our growth is about to be clobbered by Putin’s Ukraine adventure. Sunak expects inflation to peak at 7 per cent, or more. That’s effectively a huge pay-cut for every citizen, not just those in work, and it may nudge us closer to a recession. But he kept the R-word to himself. Sunak seems to enjoy being liked and he was in a hurry to get the depressing stuff out of the way.

Is Boris a Russian agent? That bizarre question occupied most of PMQs where Dominic Raab deputised for the PM while he travels abroad. The issue was raised by Angela Rayner, standing in for Keir Starmer. She said Boris’s friend, Evgeny Lebedev, had been granted a peerage despite warnings from the security services. ‘What she suggests is nonsense,’ said Raab. She brought up a 2020 meeting between Lebedev, ‘the son of a KGB officer’, and Boris in London. ‘Details of that meeting have never been released,’ she said, as if this were proof of a massive cover-up. Oddly, she then listed the details that she claimed had been suppressed. ‘Champagne and caviar’ were on the menu, she revealed. How did she know? Wasn’t it all hushed up?

Blood streams through Ukraine. Tears run through parliament. At PMQs today, numerous members urged Boris to show more compassion towards Ukraine’s refugees. Poland has already taken 1.2 million. Barely a thousand have been received here, as Boris confirmed, but the number will rise sharply. Leading the pro-refugee campaign was the SNP’s Ian Blackford who seems to represent every region on earth apart from his own constituency. In a venomous speech he charged the home secretary, Priti Patel, with imposing a ‘hostile environment’ on refugees for ‘ideological’ reasons. Well, well. No one could accuse the SNP of embracing xenophobia for political gain. Blackford lambasted the government for ‘putting up barriers and bureaucracy’.

This afternoon, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the House of Commons. A single flat-screen TV broadcast his speech to a packed chamber. Zelensky appeared in plain green fatigues next to Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flag. He looked pale, tired, fearless and determined. Squads of foreign killers are roaming his homeland trying to find him. His words were spoken in English by a translator who probably had no advance sight of the text. The halting, ungrammatical phrases made the address strangely powerful. ‘I would like to tell you about the 13 days of war. The war that we did not start.’ Zelensky’s goal is simple. ‘We do not want to lose what is ours.

Remember Alex Salmond? The former SNP leader is back. Since 2017 his little-known programme, The Alex Salmond Show, has aired weekly on RT which receives its funding from the Kremlin. Today at PMQs the party leaders combined to plug Salmond’s programme and to boost his ratings. It wasn’t a debate. It was a 30-minute Salmond advert. Sir Keir Starmer began by suggesting that RT’s licence should be revoked. ‘I see no reason why it should continue to broadcast.’ Boris replied that Ofcom and not politicians should make that decision. But he added that he believes in ‘free speech’. In other words, he opposes a ban on RT. A political choice, obviously. And Ofcom will have heard the PM loud and clear.

And still they try. MPs are desperate to get the Prime Minister to quit, live on TV, during PMQs. As if that’s about to happen. Sir Starmer has spent the last week polishing his puns. The busy wordsmith has spotted that the verb ‘scrap’ may mean ‘fight’ as well as ‘abolish’. Inspired by this linguistic accident he asked the PM to stop ‘scrapping’ with his Chancellor and get on with ‘scrapping’ his new emergency energy package. Brilliant! What a barb! How Suzie Dent must have marvelled at Professor Starmer’s verbal dexterity.  But as the applause from Dictionary Corner died away, it became clear that puns count for nothing in the bear-pit of politics.

Calm returned to the bridge. Big Dog looked comfortable in the chamber as Sir Keir Starmer quizzed him at PMQs. It started with an exchange of fireworks. Sir Keir made a statement about Boris’s suggestion that he failed to bring Jimmy Savile to justice when he was director of public prosecutions. He called this slur ‘a conspiracy theory of violent fascists’. Strong stuff.  In reply, Boris quoted Sir Keir’s statement in 2013 which appeared to apologise for oversights in relation to Savile. However – and this is the point – Sir Keir didn’t follow it up. The mortal blow has failed to land as yet. More delays will play into Boris’s hands. The longer Plod takes to issue any fines, the more trivial the law-breaking will seem.

Sir Keir Starmer has a weakness, and the Tories have spotted it. His weakness is Sir Lindsay Hoyle. The Speaker likes to interrupt PMQs when noise in the chamber exceeds a threshold known only to him. During Sir Keir’s cross-examination of Boris today, he broke in three times to deliver pompous mini-sermons that might have been scripted by John Bercow. ‘Our constituents are very interested to hear this,’ said Hoyle, having told Sir Keir to sit down. The rowdies were ordered to ‘please leave quietly’. No one left. That should have told him that a game was afoot. He himself pointed out that the shouts and jibes originate from the benches behind Boris, and it's obvious that gangs of naughty Tories are indulging in tactical sabotage on Wednesday afternoons.