‘We gave the home secretary the opportunity to appear before us, but she declined to do so,” said Keith Vaz, making free with the royal we. King Keith, chairman of the home affairs committee, has a very strong sense of his own self-importance and does not take kindly to any acts of perceived lèse-majesté. Especially not one that means he has to leave his throne in Portcullis House to address a disloyal subject from the backbenches. A reminder of the expected royal protocols was in order.
Theresa May shook her head. The home secretary may have had a rough few weeks, what with her repeated failure to find anyone from in the establishment who does not know everyone else in the establishment to chair the child abuse inquiry, and her unfortunate oversight in omitting the words “European arrest warrant” from a motion on the European arrest warrant, but she also is not averse to a little amour-propre.
Queen Theresa has been shunted back and forth between the Commons and the home affairs committee to answer difficult questions far too often of late and enough was enough. She would answer an urgent question in the house but she was not going to sing for King Keith on the same day.
This was not quite the way she put it, mind. Her official explanation for her non-appearance was that she had not wanted to spoil the surprise of the publication of the Wanless report into a possible cover-up of child abuse by the Home Office in the 1980s.
She used the word surprise in its loosest sense, as the key finding that “it was all a long time ago and it was impossible to say one way or the other whether a cover-up had taken place” was one on which Bet365 had long since closed its books. Having made her position clear, Queen Theresa did hold out an olive branch to King Keith. “I would be happy to attend his committee at some point in the future,” she decreed. His people could talk to her people.
Just when it looked as if honour had been restored and a diplomatic incident averted, Yasmin Qureshi, Labour MP for Bolton South East upped the ante by calling the home secretary Mother Theresa.
May took her beatification in her stride, modestly pointing out this was far from the first time she had been so elevated. “When I was a councillor in the London borough of Merton the then leader of the Labour group sometimes used to call me Mother Theresa,” she said, while conducting a laying on of hands for the halt and the lame from both sides of the house. There was a long queue. Blessed, indeed, are the forgetful. Vaz looked distraught at being so outgunned in status and consoled himself by searching his mobile phone to admire photographs of himself with Nelson Mandela. How thrilled Madiba had been to meet him!
Sadiq Khan also found time to study his phone intently earlier in the day at justice questions when Tory backbencher Bob Blackman had asked for an update on the risk of using a mobile phone while driving. As various photographs of Khan allegedly using his phone while driving had been published the previous week, the shadow justice secretary might have been better off developing an interest in the floor. Still, junior minister Andrew Selous had an interesting take on the possible penalties awaiting any offender. “We take drugs in prison very seriously,” he said. Much better than taking them recreationally.
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Short Guide to the Coalition, Modern Politics and the General Election, by John Crace, is published by Bantam and is available from the Guardian Bookshop
