Cringeworthy scenes

Robert Hutton has an entertaining Critic piece on what passes for debate in the House of Commons.


Cringeworthy scenes

An Old Wykehamist discovers parliament is less public school, more Bash Street Kids

It took less than ten minutes for Lindsay Hoyle to lose control at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. Three times he told the Conservative benches to quieten down before Keir Starmer could get through a question. The Speaker was furious, telling MPs, implausibly, that their constituents wanted to hear what the Labour leader had to say. But any class knows when it has the teacher on the run.

They had clearly come back from their holidays in a boisterous mood. Perhaps they’re buoyed up by some of the wishful briefing that’s featured so prominently in newspapers recently, pieces explaining that if you ignore the overall polling and focus instead on some segment of the electorate or other, Rishi Sunak is secretly on course for election triumph. You have to cling to something.


Well worth reading for the fun of it as the alternative is contempt, which may be more fitting but doesn't do much to keep the despair in check.


The problem is that Sunak just can’t pull off the role of class bully. Boris Johnson could do name-calling because he was an instinctive bully, with a coward’s instinct for the moment when the crowd can be made to turn and laugh at the weak kid. If Sunak was involved in any school bullying, my guess would be that he was on the receiving end of it.

He is much better as a smartarse, as he showed when replying to a very long Starmer question that had been made even longer by Hoyle’s inability to control the class. “I can’t quite remember,” Sunak began, “but I think he started by talking about…” This is the character he should lean into: class swot.