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], but the public wants to know what the Government is going to do about theirs.”
Dowden smiled in an amiable way. Not for him a brutality which might provoke sympathy for Rayner. He remarked that this was their fifth exchange in the House in 12 months, and went on: “Any more of these and she’ll be claiming it as her principal residence.”
Rayner gave a “ho, ho, ho” laugh. To her relief, the tax question was going to be played as pantomime. Her task now was to entertain, not to engage in a life-and-death struggle for political survival.
Punch and Judy politics is back, and she had come equipped to biff her opponent: “Has he finally realised that when he stabbed Boris Johnson in the back to get his mate into No.10 he was ditching their biggest 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 might indeed be a loser.
So Rayner lives to fight another day, and can still look forward to becoming the John Prescott of the next Labour Government.