You always know it’s going to be a good PMQs when things start with Ian Lavery. After a winding and angry monologue about things being grim up north – Holden Caulfield meets Ken Loach – Lavery, with supreme comic timing, asked the Prime Minister if there was much to look forward to on the horizon. Doubly funny was that Mr Lavery, a man so aggressive in his basic delivery that he makes an XL Bully look like a maiden aunt, managed to make this sound like a threat. Though, frankly, given the government’s track record it may as well be.

Starmer’s pomposity came back to bite him as Mrs Badenoch mocked him

Up stood Sir Keir for his weekly clucking. The fact that some Tories had found Mr Lavery amusing riled the PM: ‘He talks about poverty and they heckle him, they should be ashamed.’ It’s hard to think of moments when the Prime Minister is likeable (perhaps when he’s sat, static in Number Ten, plugged into whatever device it is that affords him his life-giving juices?) but he is indisputably at his least likeable when he does this faux outrage. Today I counted four calls for an apology, three cries of ‘they should be ashamed of themselves’ and too many uses of ‘shameful!’ for history to relate.

For a man who is overseeing, inter alia, the threatening of trial by jury, a taxpayer-funded giveaway of........

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