Outside of the commons anti-Brexit bellower, Steve Bray was having his megaphone confiscated by police and slapped with a court summons. He is too loud, according to new draconian laws introduced to stifle protest.
However, only a few feet away, in the commons, Tory members were told by the Speaker on multiple occasions to stop bellowing while stand-in Angela Rayner was trying to ask questions.
A hundred or more, mainly men, shouting at a woman in the chamber must be louder than Bray. The acoustics of democracy never sounded so hypocritical.
The PM wasn’t in today. He has fled the UK and has been to Rwanda, G7 and now a Nato meeting. You can expect him to pop into Kyiv for another photo opp with President Zelensky on his way back.
How long before the Ukrainian leader stops taking the floundering PM’s calls, you wonder?
Killer Heels
So it was Dominic Raab, the black belt in karate, against Rayner, in some killer heels, to be fair.
Rayner brings energy, a brash northern wit, and is quick on her feet.
Raab is the polar opposite, someone who sucks in vibrancy like a black hole, demure only a home counties and Oxbridge upbringing can bestow, and someone you feel would struggle to put shoes on.
At one point he made a ‘joke’ about Rayner wanting to be Labour leader and stood there deadly still. He looked like a baby who can’t work out what this new sensation was and how to cope with it.
Champagne socialist
Once he gathered himself he called out Rayner for not being on the picket line but instead going to listen to opera at Gylndebourne and accused her of being a ‘champagne socialist.’
You get the impression Dom would only believe a woman from a working-class background would attend such an event as part of the waiting staff.
It turns out Rayner saw The Marriage of Figaro, a satire about an out-of-touch ruling class, bullies and sexual predators.
She was probably trying to get some old-school tips on overthrowing the current government, she could probably expense it.
Unprotected sex
Then Raab sort of stared into the middle distance seemingly imagining what poor northerners do of a weekend, ferreting, unprotected sex in pub car parks or skipping meals due to in-work poverty.
It doesn’t bare thinking about and he won’t ever again
Returning to ‘militant’ strikers, rail staff, barristers, doctors, firefighters, teachers, postal workers, probably another couple of industries as I write this, are either on strike or heading that way.
Murdoch’s divorce party
Rayner pointed out that while the government failed to sit at the negotiation table with the RMT union they were at the banqueting table getting hundred of thousand squeezed out of their donors. They also popped over to the Serpentine for Rupert Murdoch’s most recent divorce party.
Rayner picked up on the government’s reduced defence spending, which set Raab off.
He told Angela that he will take no lectures given she campaigned to make Jeremy Corbyn PM. For someone who was leader a long while ago, he always get a mention at PMQs.
But Rayner wasn’t having it, she said she is the one who won’t take lectures from a man who was on a sun lounger as Afghanistan fell.
There was a shudder from Dom, not about the fall of a nation we invaded, but the possibility that Angela could pop up in the hotel during his next vacation.
It’s a shame all the Russian donors have lost their super yachts he could have hopped one of those, and the only Labour face he will bump into is Peter Mandelson.
And with an image of Raab and Mandy in speedos, discussing how to get filthy rich as a gruesome oligarch flies in a helicopter full of prostitutes, I bid you farewell.
Related: PMQs – Johnson fails to get traction on Government’s inaction to create faction over strike action
