Call me weird, but I appreciate a blow delivered right to the ‘fiscal rules’

There are many differences between political journalists and normal human beings. But perhaps the biggest is the way we react to resignation speeches in the House of Commons.

We in the lobby can’t get enough of them. We’re like children goggling in rapture at a playground punch-up between two of the bigger boys. Our tummies tingling, we huddle spellbound around the balcony of the press gallery, ooh-ing and ah-ing at the thump of each verbal blow. Then, the moment it’s over, off we scurry to rush out our write-ups. Stinging rebuke. Incendiary attack. Bruising, blistering, damaging, devastating …

Yet were a normal human being to watch the same speech, he or she would probably find it utterly innocuous.

All right, so I can’t be sure of that – as a political journalist, I rarely encounter any normal human beings – but I suspect my guess is a good one.

Say a normal human being had joined us in the press gallery yesterday for the resignation speech by Sajid Javid, who recently quit as chancellor. Our guest would have peered at us in bemused concern, as we gasped and winced our way through what we evidently took to be a merciless rhetorical onslaught.

Oof! Mr Javid said “the fiscal rules we were elected on were critical”! He said he hoped his successor, Rishi Sunak, would be “given space to do his job without fear or favour”! And he said “no particular person” had “a monopoly on the best ideas”! Wow! What a ferocious broadside against Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s most senior adviser! Bet old Dom felt that one!

To us, it was thrilling. And perhaps even more thrilling to the only people less like normal human beings than we are: MPS. Every last one of them looked agog. “Watch your back!” hooted an unidentified heckler at

Boris Johnson, Mr Javid’s former boss.

Had our imaginary friend from the real world been present, though, he or she might have been slightly less gripped. “Hang on a minute,” he or she might have said. “It wasn’t that explosive. This Javid bloke didn’t so much as raise his voice. And he praised Johnson for ages. And then Johnson, who at no point looked more than vaguely inconvenienced, got up and praised him back. Anyway, Javid didn’t even name the bloke he was supposedly trashing, unless you count that weedy, tittering little pun about ‘Cummings and goings’. Come off it. A proper ‘broadside’ would have been something like, I don’t know: ‘Mr Speaker, Dominic Cummings is a lizard-faced, sociopathic crackpot, and if that bone-idle blond dope doesn’t boot him out sharpish I’ll take them both down like a bald Liam Neeson.’ Now that would have been a ‘stinging rebuke’. Not all this mimsy mumbling about fiscal rules.”

Fair enough, I suppose. But also a bit cruel. Come on. We’re political journalists. We know we’re weird. Just let us have this one small pleasure.