Simon Carr: Spit it out, Yvette. It's meant to be an Urgent Question
Sketch: David Davis praised the police as having upped their game since the G20 demos – fair play, they didn't actually kill anyone
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Your support makes all the difference."The claim that Labour was quasily satisf – wasily kwai – that the Leazily of the Lazy party was – I'm sorry," Yvette Cooper said after her Stanley Unwin episode, and without the ghost of a smile, "I want to quote the Mayor accurately".
Labour was greatly exercised by Boris Johnson's assertion that Labour leaders were "quietly satisfied" with the violence on Saturday. And you can see why – it was the Conservative Party denouncing "mindless thuggery" who were quietly satisfied with the violence. Direct action from the left reflected badly on Labour, not on the Government – and that was doubtless why Yvette Cooper was granted her Urgent Question: "Why is Labour getting the blame!" It was more of an Urgent Yelp than Urgent Question.
No, what will "quietly satisfy" Labour will be a thumping recession and three million unemployed.
Theresa May said that the message from the demo was clear. "You will be caught and you will be punished." A nice young Marxist I know was caught in Fortnums. He's been punished by the ruthless apparatus of the fascist state: a condition of bail is that he's been banned from the royal wedding.
They might as well be pulling the trigger themselves.
We do know that Labour has lost the scale of what's going on. The marchers were likened by Ed Miliband to the great freedom fighting movements of history, and Jim Sheridan in the Commons suggested fighter jets be redeployed from Libya to set up a no-fly zone over Labour HQ. Hang on, he might have been joking; he's got a remarkably deadpan style. As does Jim Sheridan.
David Davis praised the police as having upped their game since the G20 demos – fair play, they didn't actually kill anyone. But he warned against one ex-policeman's request made in The Times for "dawn raids and snatch squads. That's the sort of thing we expect in Tripoli," he said.
PS We had two Milibands sitting in the chamber, one right behind the other. How similar they are. Identical hairlines. Same peculiar face-work. And a brooding, shadowy feeling coming off them both. The look on the one's face when the other was speaking needs a Jeffrey Archer to describe. But the darkness in David's face, and the guilty stillness in Ed's – both were very impressive.
Try a thought experiment. Give each of them untrammeled power. Which would be more likely to throw off his cloak and blaze at us with furious, crow black eyes, "Down! You tiny fools!" My money would be on Ed, I have to say.
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