Rishi Sunak was in Berlin, visiting the beleaguered Chancellor Olaf Scholz, to whom he referred every few sentences during their press conference as “Olaf”, as if such mateyness could show how close they are, and even on one occasion as “mein Freund”, as if this demonstrated a familiarity with the German language.
Back in Westminster we therefore found ourselves with a change of cast, Oliver Dowden standing in for Sunak and Angela Rayner for Sir Keir Starmer.
Both these understudies had over-prepared. They and their handlers had drafted lengthy lines which were considered too good to jettison in the interests of brevity and wit.
Rayner’s team decided that rather than wait for Dowden to bring up the investigation into her housing and tax affairs, she would do so herself.
With a brave, even supplicating smile at the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, she launched into her script: “I know the party opposite is desperate to talk about my living arrangements [roars of eager anticipation from the Conservative benches], however the public needs to know what the Authorities goes to do about theirs.”
Dowden smiled in an amiable means. Not for him a brutality which could provoke sympathy for Rayner. He remarked that this was their fifth change within the Home in 12 months, and went on: “Any extra of those and he or she’ll be claiming it as her principal residence.”
Rayner gave a “ho, ho, ho” chuckle. To her aid, the tax query was going to be performed as pantomime. Her activity now was to entertain, to not interact in a life-and-death wrestle for political survival.
Punch and Judy politics is again, and he or she had come outfitted to biff her opponent: “Has he lastly realised that when he stabbed Boris Johnson within the again to get his mate into No.10 he was ditching their largest election winner for a pint-sized loser?”
This column approves all references to imperial measures, and by reminding us that Johnson was an election winner she impelled the thought that Sunak would possibly certainly be a loser.
So Rayner lives to combat one other day, and might nonetheless sit up for changing into the John Prescott of the subsequent Labour Authorities.