Penny’s purple praise for Rishi Sunak could have been a love letter

ALARM bells erupted in the Commons, the sort of klaxons you get in James Bond films when the villain’s lair is under attack. For a moment the Speaker’s eyes widened with apprehension.

Then it became apparent the alarm was actually the mobile telephone of that cloth- eared muppet Barry Sheerman (Lab, Huddersfield).

‘Whoop whoop!’ went his ringtone at high volume. Eventually he heard the thing and hurried outside. ‘Is it Barry’s pacemaker?’ asked a wit.

Those may not have been the only alarm bells to peal yesterday. The House proposed binning its long-standing convention that you must be elected to speak in the Commons.

The obscure duffers of the procedure committee, no doubt hoping to do his nibs a disservice, said Lord Cameron should come to the Commons and answer departmental questions.

Dame Karen Bradley (Con, Staffordshire Moorlands) argued that the Foreign Secretary would thus become more accountable to MPs.

He would be expected to stand ‘at the bar of the house’ – it is not a bar in the drinking sense but an area just by the double doors – and perform like any other Cabinet minister answering questions. The sole difference: he would not be at the despatch box.

Dame Karen, once a sprat in the Cameron government, insisted this should not be taken as establishing a precedent. Odd thing to say. Parliament reveres, and largely operates on, precedent.

The Cameron gambit, if it happens, will come to be seen as modern practice and will dilute the exclusivity of the Commons. Having claimed she was uninterested in precedents, Dame Karen accepted that the committee had been driven in part by, er, precedent.

The Duke of Wellington stood at the bar of the Commons in 1814 to thank MPs for supporting the Peninsular War.

William Wragg (Con, Hazel Grove) noted that although Lords Wellington and Cameron ‘may have enjoyed rather different campaigns in Europe’, the appearance of a peer at the bar of the Commons was ‘deeply wedded in tradition’. Mr Wragg was overstating his case but it was elegantly done.

Dame Karen went out of her way to say that she had been encouraged in her work by the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle.

One hopes he knows what he is doing.

Having Lord Cameron perform to the Commons would be a fine spectacle for us inky scribblers but what would it do to the dignity of the Commons? Should the elected house not be more jealous of its privileges?

THE special thing about anything said in the Commons is that it is spoken by an elected MP. If any old Etonian can saunter up and join debates, something sacred may be sacrificed.

And what will that do to arguments that peers should not run spending departments, or that no peer should be PM? But Dame Karen will have had her moment in the sun.

The morning also brought the Leader of the Commons, Penny Mordaunt, to the box.

Her Labour counterpart, Lucy Powell, spoke so piously about the importance of ‘civility in politics’ that you would never have thought she was beside Sir Keir Starmer during his rancid attacks on Rishi Sunak on Wednesday.

Miss Mordaunt duly delivered a passage of the most purple praise for Mr Sunak. It could have been a love letter. ‘He is a wonderful dad. He gives quietly to charities. He runs for his local hospice. He is a shareholder in three community hubs.’ The speech should have been to Holst’s Thaxted.

Well before the end Ms Powell looked as though she rather regretted ever expressing that view of civility in politics.

And then the poor Scots Nats frontbencher (an Australian called Deidre Brock) had a go. Every week she tilts at Miss Mordaunt. Every week it is a bloodbath. This time was worse than ever. Civility in politics was abandoned as big Penny made mincemeat of dear Deidre.

In the old days they would have shown it on Sportsnight, with Harry Carpenter in the commentary box.