Cameron in the Commons – rattled but not yet beaten
By design or accident, David Cameron’s anger was fully on display today. He went for the indignant mode – Flashman on a high horse without medication.
Ed Miliband was all about “self-serving double standards” and couldn’t “get his facts right.” Margaret Hodge’s powerful public accounts committee was guilty of “drift” and Dennis Skinner should go and claim his pension. What did we actually learn?
– That David Cameron thought he should’ve been allowed to carry on with his local election campaigning in Buckinghamshire and not summoned to the Commons by the Speaker – “let me set out the position again,” he said as he opened. His aides growled that “nothing had changed” since he last spoke to the Commons, there were “no new facts.
– That the PM will refer the Jeremy Hunt case to Alex Allan “if new evidence emerges,” which it might through Leveson. (Some puzzlement on this one because Prime Ministers are supposed to root out evidence using the relevant Whitehall hands if there’s a sniff of something untoward with a minister … not sit around waiting for stuff to “emerge,” presumably via leaks if it doesn’t turn up at Leveson.
– That the Tory chairman of the media select committee thinks that there could be a role for his committee looking into all this if Leveson doesn’t throw anything up. He seems to think “cross-examination” of Jeremy Hunt might be a good idea too – not sure by whom.
The PM’s team is letting it be known they think Ed Miliband flunked it today because he didn’t have any new line or argument or evidence. They insist the PM didn’t lose his temper in the Commons, but from where I was sitting he seemed angry, his hand occasionally shook, he showed a surprising acquaintance with both the DCMS Perm Sec’s appearance at the public accounts committee last week and the Leveson evidence sessions from last week, suggesting that this celebrated DVD boxed set fan may be watching too much live TV.
He and Jeremy Hunt seemed very fired up. The PM turned at one point to say “thank you, thank you” to backbenchers shouting approval behind him. I would say my overall impression was that he was seriously rattled on this one but not yet beaten.
