PMQs: Emily Thornberry said she 'wasn't going to go there' with Damian Green – but she may as well have

With Theresa May in Saudi Arabia, “strengthening post-Brexit trade links” with Britain’s preferred bomb buyer in the region, the Prime Minister was replaced at PMQs with what friends of Damian Green might call her safest pair of tablecloths.

Damian Green currently exists under the cloud of an investigation into allegations of improper conduct with a female journalist 30 years his junior, but whatever frisson there might have been over whether his various interrogators would or would not go there was fatally undermined for two reasons.

Firstly, fronting up for Labour was Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, whose reluctance to venture into delicate areas should certainly be measured against her recent conference speech, which majored less on foreign policy and more on the unconventional family arrangements of her counterpart, Boris Johnson.

Secondly, lurking later down the list of question-askers was Labour’s John Mann, long-serving Honourable Member for Where Angels Fear to Tread.

Thornberry, for her part, didn’t go there, though she so nearly went there she was forced to clarify that she was not going there. Her first question, zipping with delicious pace down what Geoffrey Boycott calls the corridor of uncertainty, was entirely free of context: “Is he happy to be held to the same standards in government that he expected of government when he was in opposition?”

Hansard will inevitably not record that the First Secretary’s response was so deeply staccato’d by panicked “ums” and “errs” that it sounded less like an answer and more like the oboe duet from Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.

“I um yes err do erm think urm yes that erm standards urm yes the err ministerial erm code and yes I err absolutely erm do think that yes that’s erm a very erm important erm part of erm confidence in public life.”

Had he known then what he would come to know in a second, that Thornberry was of course asking specifically about a question he himself had asked to then Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott about nurses leaving the NHS, he might have allowed himself to relax a bit more before the inevitable Mann interjection later.

(Thornberry and Green swapped six questions about the NHS, by the way, but as a supporter of the NHS, I intend to stick firmly to my rule of never typing up the latest political point-scoring over it. When the NHS is eventually inevitably privatised, one small comfort will be the release from no longer having to listen to politicians weaponise its various problems instead of seeking to solve them.)

When it came to Mann’s turn, he made his enquiry with the expected subtlety of a man best remembered for pointing his finger and shouting “You’re a Nazi apologist!” at Ken Livingstone through a disabled toilet door.

For his part, Green looked rather less uncomfortable in his own skin than he did a few weeks ago when the allegations first appeared, as Mr Mann a) told him: “Being believed, reliving trauma, a culture of denial are some of the reasons very many women are reluctant to report rape, assault and sexual harassment.” And then b) asked him to “apologise on behalf of the Government to the victims of sexual harassment who the Government and Parliament have been letting down”.

Green agreed that more must be done to “reform aspects of the culture of politics so that young men and women who are interested in politics do not feel deterred from taking part in it”.

Green denies all the allegations against him, principally that he touched a female journalist’s leg under the table over a drink, allegations that prompted friends and allies of his to anonymously brief the media that the journalist in question had probably mistaken his hand for the tablecloth.

There is, as Green says, lots that can be done to reform aspects of the culture of politics so that young men and women do not feel deterred from taking part in it.