Who will be next week’s ministerial exit?

For the past fortnight, it was Suella Braverman. Now it’s Sir Gavin Williamson. The media aims to destroy two careers a month, on average, and the present quest to topple Sir Gavin has already produced a result. He’s gone.

But that’s not enough. It never is. The new clamour is for the nasty knight to be stripped of his title and reduced to plain old Mr Williamson. At PMQs, the resignation was problematic for Sir Keir because he had to argue over a dead parrot. He quoted Sir Gavin’s unhelpful suggestion to a colleague that he should ‘slit his own throat.’ It might have served Sir Keir better to conceal the phrase and to describe it as too shocking and violent to bear repetition. Once he’d quoted the words, his attack lost oomph. He asked us to imagine the victim’s reaction to Rishi’s expression of ‘great sadness’ at Sir Gavin’s departure. Theoretically a strong point. But only theoretically. He called Sir Gavin ‘pathetic’, and ‘a cartoon bully with a pet spider,’ (where did the pet spider come from?). And he enlarged on Sir Gavin’s history of menacing behaviour. ‘He spent years courting the idea that he can intimidate others.’ Even worse, he ‘gets off’ on power-trips, said Sir Keir, hinting at an erotic component to Sir Gavin’s methods. He challenged Rishi to apologise for putting such a creature in a position of authority. 

Rishi: I obviously regret appointing someone who’s had to resign in these circumstances.

Against the rules, clearly. Ignoring the question while pretending to answer it. But he got away with it. Rishi has a rather fragile and delicate appearance, like a glazed china statuette on your great aunt’s mantelpiece. But in debate, he’s as tough and nimble as a farm-dog trained to harry rats out of a grain-store. Sir Keir tried to associate Rishi with Sir Gavin’s character defects and he claimed that the Prime Minister is ‘weak … and worried the bullies will turn on him.’ Rishi brazened this out and praised himself for the great triumph of Sir Gavin’s departure. He said it was a fine example of ‘integrity, professionalism and accountability’. This was laughable. But Sir Keir didn’t laugh, and instead he turned to his favourite mugging victim, Shell, which Rishi refuses to clobber in accordance with Labour’s demands.

Rishi wants a filthy rich oil industry. Sir Keir wants a filthy rich state, and he spends as much time prospecting for untapped revenues as Shell does looking for oil. Why do the Tories never mention that pension funds are heavily invested in the oil majors and that plundering their profits means stealing from granny’s biscuit-tin?

Labour’s Karl Turner took up the class-war battle-cry and asked Rishi to imagine a medical emergency at home. Most of us have three options, said Turner: to phone a GP who doesn’t take calls, to spend 12 hours in Casualty, or to wait for a non-existent ambulance. But Rishi has the luxury of using his ‘£750m of unearned wealth’ to summon a private doctor. Rishi thanked him for this important question and paid tribute to his local hospital, North Allerton, for keeping his family in good fettle.

Labour are maddened by Rishi’s mega-wealth. He could give every MP a million pounds and still have enough to buy a sky-scraper. But the opposition can’t find a way to turn his assets into a toxic liability. And this failure fuels their bitterness when they fight the class-war. Barry Shearman had a go. He said that back in February he warned Rishi, then chancellor, that there were ‘children going to bed at night with no food in their tummies and no heat in their homes.’ Rishi shrugged this aside and declared that ‘workless households’ are the real cause of poverty. Which is an interesting message.