Up and down like a Jack-in-the-box jumped George Galloway (Workers’ Party, Rochdale) at the first PMQs since his by-election victory.
He did so in vain, for the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, declined to call him, denying him the opportunity to make an attention-grabbing jibe just before Jeremy Hunt rose to deliver the Budget.
The grown-ups are still, just, in charge, and few are more grown-up than Hunt. Here is a man who can be trusted to do the prudent thing.
He did not actually mention Prudence, so dear to Gordon Brown in the early years of his chancellorship – though later, alas, the brute betrayed her, and launched the country into a boom which duly bust.
Hunt wished us to get the message that for him, Prudence will always come first. “A Conservative Government will always put sound money first,” was the way he put it.
“There can be no solid growth without solid finances,” he added a few moments later.
But the trouble with dear old Prudence is that she not, frankly, very good company. Her warmest admirers admit she is never going to set the Thames on fire, though they contend that this is one of her many virtues, for who wants the river to burst into flames?
The plain fact is that Prudence is liable, when left to her own devices, to be a crashing bore, and is unlikely on her own to persuade millions of voters to return to the Conservative cause by the time of the general election.
In order to excite his own backbenchers, something more was required, and Hunt tried to provide it by attacking Labour while remaining true to Prudence.
Again and again he accused Labour of having no plan: “They don’t have a growth plan so they might as well listen to ours,” he declared when the Opposition grew restive.
When he announced changes to Stamp Duty, he mocked Angela Rayner, who has recently been in some embarrassment on that score: “I see the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party paying close attention.”
Conservative backbenchers roared their approval, which helped Hunt when he confirmed a moment or two later that he is stealing Labour’s plan to subject non-doms to UK tax on their foreign earnings.
He also confirmed the report in yesterday’s Times of a cut in National Insurance. This was the most Hunt could offer without being denounced by Prudence as a two-timing cheat.
Fair-minded observers will have noted Hunt’s professionalism and decency. He paid a graceful tribute to his wife, and the eldest of their “three gorgeous children”, who sat watching him from the gallery.
He has set things up for an election in which the Conservatives can accuse Labour of having no plan except raising taxes: “Labour’s Tax Bombshell” as it was called in 1992.
And he has done various other decent things, such as announce the funding of a memorial to the Muslims who died fighting for this country in two world wars.