Today marked Jeremy Corbyn’s first Prime Minister’s Questions as leader of the opposition and he came armed with actual questions from the actual public, which is a rarity in British Politics. The House of Commons isn’t really filled with commoners either, considering Members of Parliament earn over £67000 a year, even before expenses – the average is £26500. Nor does Corbyn’s straight talking politics fit with the theatrical nonsenses of the Commons. MPs do not directly address each other, they talk through the Speaker, a hilarious figure in his own right, in a strange facsimile of a family whose parents refuse to communicate and therefore speak through the children at the dinner table.
When someone has finished speaking, the room descends into an upper class game of whack-a-mole, where you stand if you’d like to speak. Only one MP gets to speak, the others just sit back down again. The Speaker then shouts the lucky MP’s name, just in case the rest of them don’t have the mental capacity to remember who the leader of the opposition is at any given time.
Contrary to Corbyn, Cameron is an experienced combatant of the Commons, a master of both the pretentious put down (He ends every answer with the same nuanced intonation like he’s been voice coached by an intern) and the improvised repartee with his own party members – In reply to one Tory MP’s request for help importing a tiger, Cameron said he’d do all he can to help, having already helped import a rhino for another zoo, which had been named after his daughter Nancy, whom he previously left in a country pub. He said “Nancy has been breeding ever since she arrived.” His daughter is eleven.
The Daily Spittoon 