Few cheers for Cameron

A rather subdued Prime Minister’s Questions session today. Perhaps MPs are tired after the excitement of last night. Tory MPs seem to make less and less noise every time their new “nice boy” leader stands up. When he rose for his second bout of questions today there was barely a murmur. But perhaps that was because one of his rapid U turns had been so cruelly exposed after his previous question.

There are a lot of very odd Tory MPs who seem to be rather dim but I’m sure they’re not. They do love their clichés though. At nearly every PMQs one of them prefaces his (it’s always a he) question with ‘before the Prime Minister retires will he find time’ or some-such. I suppose they think they’re being witty and original; perhaps the first one who did it was, slightly. But it’s rather sad to watch as they pause, expecting huge guffaws, and get silence.

The warm up session for Mr Blair rotates. This week it was Deputy PMQs which is rather better sport than the others. So the House went from discussions about the capacity of the drains near Aylesbury to the alarming situation in Iran in under an hour.

It was Menzies Campbell who mentioned Iran but his questions were both so short it was hard to know what his angle was. Perhaps it’s his new tactic in an attempt to avoid the embarrassment of his first go. Even when uttering only a few words he can still be fabulously pompous.

The Rev Ian Paisley rose to put a question but was cut short by the speaker after what seemed like a couple of hours. He was so incensed that he raised a point of order after everyone else had left. He complained that Mr Blair hadn’t answered his question. Rev P is wonderfully old but as he’s sat through hundreds of PMQs you might have thought he’d have learnt by now…..