Michael White's Blog, page 48

Birthday boy Nick Clegg on a hiding to nothing

Lib Dem deputy prime minister should have been celebrating turning 47 – but instead he had to suffer in the Commons

It was Nick Clegg's birthday on Tuesday and it sounded like the onset of a midlife crisis. Forty-seven and in a dead end job with no end in sight unless Labour gets its act together.

Not on a zero-hours contract, not yet, but his future befogged in uncertainty.

Locked in a loveless marriage with the Tories too, no wonder he sounded even glummer than usual.

Worse, the day just happened to coincide with the deputy PM's question time. Who says the Commons authorities are a humourless bunch, eh?

"Birthday greetings," said fellow Lib Dem, the chirpy Bob Russell, halfway through the session. It was well meant, but Sir Bob spoiled the effect by asking for "a progress report on the triple lock for pensions".

Who cares about pensions when you are 47 and going to have to work until 75 to trim George Osborne's deficit? Besides, as MPs know, the triple lock is coalition dynamite. Osborne and IDS want to ravish pensioner incomes to be fair to the already ravished majority.

Seated behind him Tory backbenchers, eager for some red meat after all that Christmas turkey, were starting to bite the birthday boy.

Clegg was on a hiding to nothing. He knew it. Poor Nick. Barely two weeks ago he was probably basking on an Andalusian beach, necking white rioja with his wife's paella and Brussels sprouts.

"On my birthday I look forward to nothing more than coming to DPM's questions," he replied. Some politicians could have got a laugh out of that admission, rueful but funny.

Not Clegg. In his glum Eeyore-ish way he sounded genuinely sorry for himself. Some 47-year-olds buy a red sports car or a Harley-Davidson. Nick gets pension questions.

What a contrast to his predecessors! Ever-confident Paddy Ashdown usually managed to sound like Disney's SAS version of AA Milne's Tigger ("bouncing is what Tiggers do best") toting an Uzi, while Charles Kennedy was one of nature's Piglets, boosting his courage with another single malt.

It had not been an easy session. Greg Clark, Clegg's hopelessly nice deputy (he ruined his career by praising Polly Toynbee), had been tormented by MPs over individual voter registration. Labour MPs suspect it is a plot to stop voters voting; some Tories merely hope it is.

Clark was also roughed up over the coalition's habit of stuffing the unreformed Lords with expensive new peers. Every worm finally turns. You did it first, the ministerial invertebrate replied.

"Why is the deputy prime minister not answering this question?" interjected Tory grandee Sir Peter Tapsell. Sir Peter normally speaks only to God or (in His absence) to David Cameron, but could not resist a chance to remind MPs that Lords reform is another of the birthday boy's doomed projects.

Forty-seven and not a reformed bicameral legislature to his name! No wonder he misses the beach.

Bullied over social mobility, Clegg decided to indulge himself. Hey, you're only 47 once! If you can't buy a Harley you can at least flaunt the coalition's mobility reforms. Vroom, vroom.

"It is a counsel of pessimism somehow to assume that people's life chances are blighted at birth," he added. It certainly was not his own experience.

Later Clegg was attacked over crowding in hospital A&E wards. Nonsense, replied Clegg, by now quite combative, we are treating thousands more patients than under Labour. Vroom, vroom.

This was a bit like saying that Syrian refugee camps in Turkey and Lebanon are so much more successful this Christmas than last.

It brought the scornful wrath of Labour's Sadiq Khan down on his head. "Stafford hospital," replied Clegg, whose Lib Dem mean gene had finally kicked in.

Taxed about the stalled Heseltine plan for devolving power from Whitehall, he brazenly claimed that Lord Heseltine's "fundamental insight" was that Whitehall did not always know best. This was nonsense. Hezza's fundamental insight has always been that, wherever he happens to be, Hezza knows best. He is one of nature's Harley-Davidson types.

When someone asked who would be Britain's next EU commissioner, Labour's Angela Eagle tried to put the DPM out of his misery. "Nick Clegg," she shouted. But by then the birthday boy had left on his imaginary Harley-Davidson scooter.

• This article was amended on 8 January 2014. The original article said Nick Clegg was 46. He is actually 47.

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Simon Hoggart, Guardian and Observer journalist, dies aged 67

Humorous and often acerbic columnist, who chronicled the folly of politicians for four decades, dies from pancreatic cancer
Read Simon Hoggart's obituary

Simon Hoggart, one of the wittiest and most distinctive writers on the Guardian and Observer for 45 years, has died from pancreatic cancer, it was announced on Sunday. He was 67 and had managed to work and lead an active social life for three and a half years after being told his condition would prove fatal.

It was only in December that complications arising from the disease in combination with another round of chemotherapy forced Hoggart to give up writing the Guardian's parliamentary sketch – which he had done for 20 years – as well as his popular Saturday column. His final article, a review of the year just ending, appeared on 19 December. It was a waspish summary in which he noted that, while Pope Francis "may have renounced his own infallibility", Margaret Thatcher never did.

Though he got home to his family in west London late on Christmas Day, Hoggart soon returned to the Royal Marsden hospital, where he died on Sunday afternoon. Until the last few days visitors had found him sounding off, as usual, against favourite targets – the folly of politicians, publishers and privatised train companies, the pleasures of food and drink, the stupidity of manufacturers' safety warnings. He remained determined not to give up, nor to let his illness become widely known lest it detract from the laughter he always sought to generate.

The elder son of Richard Hoggart, the literary and cultural academic, Simon Hoggart joined the Guardian straight from university in 1968. He rapidly emerged as a journalistic polymath whose career ranged from covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland and five years as the Observer's Washington correspondent to writing about politics for Punch, and wine and television criticism for the Spectator.

A regular on many radio and TV programmes, Hoggart chaired Radio 4's The News Quiz for 10 years before 2006. He published 20 books and anthologies and became a regular figure on the festival circuit. Though a resourceful news reporter and feature writer with an eye for telling detail and a vivid turn of phrase, he found his most comfortable niche as a humorous, usually acerbic columnist, notably as the Guardian's sketchwriter, briefly in the 1970s and after his return to the Guardian from 12 years on the Observer in 1993.

In his final parliamentary sketch, the day after George Osborne's autumn statement, he likened the chancellor to Mr Micawber ( "In America the president's aides are scratching their heads and wondering how they can create their own British miracle") and wrote of David Cameron that "he smiled like the Cheshire Cat after a large sherry". Of Ed Balls's response, Hoggart declared: "If he had pretended to be any angrier he would have been coughing up his own intestines."

Hoggart's world view was shaped by his family roots in the industrial north of England. He knew Thatcher had made necessary reforms but felt she was neither evil witch nor national saviour, merely increasingly mad. He disliked New Labour ("if they ever invent a fat-free lard it would resemble a New Labour MP") and thought Tony Blair a self-satisfied opportunist. "I sat in the front row for Tony Blair's (conference) speech. It was like the monsoon in a Somerset Maugham short story," he once wrote. John Major's curious vocabulary and sentence structure he routinely ascribed to the then-PM having learned English as a second language in a British Council office in rural Nigeria.

He also tormented John Prescott and Lib Dem ministers in general. But he could be kind when he decided a politician had risen to a difficult occasion and had his favourites. They included Sir Peter Tapsell, now father of the Commons, whose grandiloquent style of speech prompted Hoggart to suggest that monks must be writing down his every word on vellum.

The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, said: "Simon was a terrific reporter and columnist – and a great parliamentary sketchwriter. He wrote with mischief and a sometimes acid eye about the theatre of politics. But he wrote from a position of sophisticated knowledge and respect for parliament. A daily reading of his sketch told you things about the workings of Westminster which no news story could ever convey. He will be much missed by readers and his colleagues."

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Today's uncomfortable thoughts for the day … with PJ Harvey | Michael White

Musician's guest edit of BBC's Today programme drafted in John Pilger and Julian Assange to challenge our prejudices

I enjoyed listening to John Pilger and Julian Assange on PJ Harvey's guest-edited edition of Radio 4's Today programme this morning. Excellent. It's not that I necessarily trust their handling of the facts, let alone their judgment, much more than I do the Daily Mail's. It's just that – like the Mail – they force us to confront our comforting prejudices.

Having an outsider come in to shake things up is always a gamble, a bit like calling in management consultants at a company or government department. They may be brilliant – as some of Today's guest editors are – and they may be dull or worse. I didn't catch all of PJ Harvey's – Polly Jane to the family, I expect – but she's pretty talented and obviously decent, so you had to admire her determination to shine some light on neglected corners like war-injured servicemen and the UN security council. Here's her own website's running order.

What fascinates me with such exercises is how persuasive they are – or are not – in changing people's views. Reading the Mail (it's the best of the rightwing polemical papers in my view) is often hard work, though it has a lively mix (the health features are terrific and City coverage combative) and a stream of reliable jokes, erudite and malicious, from diarist, Ephraim Hardcastle.

But the relentless and hectoring nature of much of what it does usually puts me off. The "Man Who Hated Britain" attack on Ed Miliband's father, the Marxist intellectual, Ralph Miliband, was a case in point. There is a really interesting study to be done of Ralph's world view and its impact on his younger son. But the Mail's bilious attack has made it toxic.

I feel the same way about some of today's Today. John Pilger's take on the world is better known to older readers, he's less often on radio and TV now – no longer writing for the Mirror either – which is a shame because his kind of indignation is best suited to young people for whom things are simpler than they become as most of us get older.

Pilger took as his text media censorship and the poll which suggested that most Brits only think 10,000 Iraqis were killed during the US/UK-led invasion-occupation when the reality may be closer to 1 million. In saying that, JP may be almost as guilty of overstatement as the poll found public opinion was guilty of understatement. It's a much-disputed figure. Pilger also said that in the days when Saddam Hussein was still "a good dictator" (ie deemed to be on our side) Sunni and Shia Iraqis lived happily side by side, a distinctly Pilgerish take which means the ancient sectarian feud is all our fault.

Delivering the second of the day's Thoughts for the Day (former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams delivered the first), Julian Assange was much more persuasive. Holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy he has time to think, and quoted both Aristotle and the Books of Proverbs on the natural human thirst for knowledge and understanding on the world in which we live. "Knowledge is power," he said. Quite so, and it was only a small jump to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden's disclosures about the long reach of the NSA and GCHQ.

It's not quite true that the invention of the printing presses "was opposed by the old powers of Europe". Princes did try to control it and Catholic countries were far worse than the emerging Protestant ones – for whom the vernacular translation of the bible was transforming – but they went with the technological flow. It was the mighty Ottoman empire, the imperial power which terrified Christian Europe, which banned the new discovery. That was the error which would eventually allow George W Bush to occupy once-mighty Baghdad 500 years later.

Where the monochrome view of a Pilger or Assange gets it wrong is in the same way that the Mail gets it wrong and that Noam Chomsky got it wrong the last time I heard him addressing a large audience, at the Friends Meeting House in central London in 2013. They want to blame the "other" for all our woes, they want to blame foreigners. In the Mail's case – I dare not read the less subtle Sun or Express's take – they focus on Romanians and Bulgarians, on Roma in particular (try Elinor Goodman's informed Radio 4 view here … ), the foreigners most perceived to threaten our way of life in 2014.

There are serious issues about immigration which successive governments have handled badly. But the media have responsibilities here, too – and behave worse. When Pilger, Assange or Noam Chomsky address US or British abuses – torture in Cyprus during the Eoka crisis of the 1950s popped up in PJ Harvey's edition – they have issues worth addressing too, if only to guard against repeating past failures and crimes.

We are victims of media censorship is the thrust of their complaint, the "normalisation of the unthinkable" as another critic, Edmund Herman, puts it. As always, the rich and powerful want to know all they can about us – "the serfs and slaves" as Assange called us – while letting us know as little as possible about them.

I have a lot of sympathy with that concern, indeed I recently wrote a piece about the dangers from oligarchy of fashionable anti-politics rhetoric on the left. Where we should part company from such talk is in regarding ourselves merely as pawns and victims. There has never been a time in history when it has been easier for most people to know a LOT about what's going on in the world. Voters have responsibilities too and the mainstream media is not the only tool available. Nor are the western powers the sole villains of the story – victimisation of China is laughable in 2014. Yet China gets a pretty gentle run.

For the Pilgerites the evil foreigners are not the Mail's gypsies or Chinese entrepreneurs resource-grabbing in Africa, but us, white Europeans and their former colonial descendants, mostly in the Anglosphere. We are the foreigners who invade other people's worlds and spoil them. If there was an upside (there usually was) it is either not mentioned or discounted. Pilger likened the death rate in Iraq to the Rwandan genocide on Thursday morning, a dreadful failure of UN non-intervention, but so far as I know it's not one of his causes.

That's OK, he can't do everything. But when I listened to Chomsky, erudite and funny, mocking the crimes of the Anglosphere, I was struck by the near absence of any mention of the old Soviet Union's (now Putin's Russia) opportunist role in the Middle East's miseries, let alone those Chinese oil contracts. Palestine is his great cause, but to listen to Chomsky you would not know that Palestinian terrorists had ever bombed an Israeli bus or thrown stones (and worse) into crowded cities. It's not just good guy/bad guy, it's more tragic than that.

If I understand correctly, Chomsky explains that he is an American and his duty is to hold American power to account. OK, but I am not sure it works very well except among the already-converted who don't need any more help in feeling a warm glow of self-righteous persecution. By the same token PJ Harvey's programme included the Guardian's indefatigable sleuth, Ian Cobain, discussing the British army's torture record with Phil Shiner, the lawyer who handles Iraqi compensation claims.

It was interesting to anyone who might not know much about the subject, but it was not a very balanced discussion despite the efforts of John Humphrys who did the interview to put the absent army's side. Sarah Montague and Mishal Husain were presenting the show, so Humpo – who is Daily Mail man incarnate in some ways – could be seen as one of the guests, a token dissident in the Dorset singer-songwriter's world.

As it happened, one of the programme's last items shone some inadvertent light on the problem. Montague interviewed Professor Robert Service, a tough old Soviet-watcher, on Kim Jong-un's blood-curling New Year message about why he had to kill his once-loved uncle. The language of cleansing, of ridding the homeland of contaminating foreign filth, is characteristic of North Korea, of China and the Soviet Union, indeed of all totalitarian regimes, Service explained. It's important, too, when broadcasting for the tyrant not to make boasts that his domestic audience will not laugh at in the privacy of their own homes, he said.

Well, such risks and temptations affect us all in milder ways, the impulse to blame the "other". Whatever its considerable faults elsewhere, western imperialism is not to blame for the grotesque and incompetent communist dynasty which savagely rules North Korea, although China props it up for want of a better solution. In fairness to Beijing, I doubt if it feels very comfortable with its choice. That's life, alas.

Perhaps we will hear more about it on Friday's edition of the Today programme.

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John Coward obituary

John Coward, who has died aged 88, helped build the Notting Hill Housing Trust into a pioneering force in the innovative "third sector" provision of homes. He is widely credited with creating what was once called "community leasing" and is now universally known as shared ownership. Under John's leadership, the NHHT expanded from small beginnings in the Rachman slum landlord era to ownership and management of almost 8,000 properties across west London by the time he retired after 21 years at the helm in 1986.

The trust had been founded in 1963 by the Rev Bruce Kenrick, who went on to found Shelter. But John, whom Kenrick recruited from a safe job as deputy housing manager in Richmond ("job for life, pension, close to home" as one friend put it), was the practical manager who could handle difficult people – Afro-Carribean militants at the Mangrove restaurant, as well as officialdom – and run a fast-growing organisation.

He was an excellent boss, especially to women, whom he promoted and trusted with heavy responsibility. In the 1960s that too was pioneering. Imbued with his social entrepreneurship and strong moral sense, a generation of his proteges went on to run housing associations across the country. He also found time to be a passionate gardener and a shrewd and loyal friend to many, including me and my wife, Pat.

Born in Cardiff, educated at Sheen grammar school, south-west London (his father was in charge of the local cemetery), John was an apprentice housing manager when called to wartime service. After nearly shelling an observation post during officer training, he was reduced to the ranks and dispatched to signals work on the North-West Frontier of India where he learned the Urdu which peppered his conversation thereafter. So did tortoises, because John kept his childhood pet well into mutual old age. We were among those who inherited a tiny offspring.

Unflashy but tenacious, Coward spotted how to buy decayed houses in multi-occupation, then "decant" its tenants while single rooms were turned into proper flats to rehouse them. Some traumatised tenants needed to be coaxed into using a whole flat, not just one room. John's team raised charitable money to fund such sensitive personal services that council grants could not.

Increasingly influential in the national policy debate (he was appointed OBE in 1974), John saw the potential for housing action areas that would require bad landlords either to improve their property or sell to a housing association like his. He helped create the bipartisan 1974 Housing Act which revolutionised public funding for housing associations to do what less flexible councils were unwilling or unable to do: build affordable homes.

He is survived by his wife, Helen (nee Heal), a teacher of special needs children, whom he married in 1949; two sons, Ian and Richard; and two grandchildren, Alexander and Oliver.

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Political anger and apathy a reflection of voter 'kidiocy' | Michael White

For all their faults, politicians remain a barrier that protects us from the rising power of unaccountable oligarchy

You may have missed it in the pre-Christmas rush, but another former Labour MP was jailed this week as a belated consequence of the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal.

Denis MacShane got six months from judicial tough guy Mr Justice Sweeney after pleading guilty on the advice of his lawyer to fraudulently claiming £12,900 in expenses. No jury would acquit a politician in the current climate of public opinion, he was apparently told.

That figures. Just look at Friday's Guardian/ICM poll which found that 47% of respondents are "angry" with the political class and 25% chiefly "bored". Only 46% of 18- to-24-year-olds actually vote, many saying it makes no difference. Yet they are the same people who complain that oldies (76% of whom vote) are treated better than the young. How about a new word: Kidiots?

It's the same outraged climate of distracted opinion which demanded a new regime to police MPs' expenses and new rules that are now, predictably, pushing costs up, not down. It's the same clamour to have an independent arbiter of MPs' salaries but howls with anger when the arbiter proposes, as it recklessly did this month, that they get a 9% pay rise in 2015 (or 11% as the media inaccurately prefer to call it). It's never the right time to pay MPs more – which is why they were encouraged to beef up their expenses.

Truly, politics is a mug's game for addictive masochists. Just read the abuse in the comments of this article. Just read the uncynical John Harris's interviews with apathetic and ignorant young voters in Manchester. Or Rowena Mason on the kidiots who may never vote.

"So what?" you may murmur as you munch another mince pie. "Those politicians had it coming to them. Everyone hates them and they are all volunteers. As for that MacShane, he put himself on the wrong side of the law in forging signatures for expenses claims for travel and hospitality, research and translation fees for trips to Europe he continued to make after Tony Blair replaced him as Europe minister in 2005."

Correct. But it is a glib summary and a dangerous one. For all their (much exaggerated) faults, elected politicians in a country like the UK are still a barrier that protects us from the rising power of unaccountable oligarchy and rampant plutocracy which clearly threatens the democratic gains of the last 200 years.

Who do you think whips up much of the voter anger against MPs? Why, the oligarch-owned press whose owners and their lapdogs rail against wasteful use of taxpayers' money without paying too much themselves – even as they seek to convince us that plutocracy is good for us all. Check out Priyamvada Gopal's excellent piece about the cult of the super-rich.

Or check out MacShane, multilingual son of post-war immigrants, passionate pro-European, Tiggerish in his enthusiasms, sometimes daft but not apathetic or a cynic if respected colleague and justice campaigner Chris Mullin can still write an admiring piece about him. It ought to give pause for though to the kidiots and their disaffected mums and dads, but probably won't. Hey, the sales have started!

MacShane is an odd case, even by the rough-justice standards of the expenses scandal unleashed in a highly efficient but distinctly one-sided way before the 2010 election by the Daily Telegraph, owned by the Barclays brothers, two Sark-loving, quasi-feudal plutocrats. Remember, their paper tried (and failed) to stitch up such suburban puritans as Gordon Brown and the hair-shirted Vince Cable – twice in Vince's case: expenses and the constituency surgery sting which backfired over Murdoch and his BSkyB bid.

Consider this comparison: shortly after David Laws became George Osborne's Treasury deputy (introducing the first bout of cuts in May 2010), the Telegraph went through its capacious files and ended his cabinet career by revealing the minister had claimed £40,000 in second-home costs between 2004-09 on property owned by his partner – in breach of the rules.

At the time I had some sympathy for the Yeovil MP on the grounds that the partner was a man and Laws had not told his Catholic mother he was gay.

Reading the parliamentary commissioner for standards' subsequent report I realised I had been generous. Never mind, Laws said he could have claimed much more but paid back an agreed £13,000 and was suspended for seven days. He is now back in ministerial office.

Here's the Telegraph's summary of the four (now five) Labour MPs and two Tory peers who have been jailed. You may notice that some of the sums involved are considerably larger. MacShane repaid £12,900 in false claims, though the report of the parliamentary commissioner, John Lyon, on his case – generally hostile in tone, albeit it in the obsequious way often deployed by retired civil servants – conceded that £5,400 of the then MP's claims were probably within the rules for foreign travel. Rough justice, as I said.

Former Tory MP Derek Conway was ordered to repay more than £16,000 paid to his sons for alleged parliamentary research work just before the main expenses scandal broke. There are plenty of examples of lesser penalties, the most conspicuous to my mind being that of Michael Trend, Tory MP for Windsor (1992-2005), who made a false claim for a second home and was ordered in 2003 to repay £90,277 before retiring quietly at the next election. In fairness I should add that Labour's Lady Uddin, suspended from the Lords for 18 months in 2010, was ordered to repay no less than £120,000 in dodgy housing claims, the highest sum I can find.

Is there a pattern in this? A distinguished Tory columnist once suggested in print that it shows Labour is keenest to milk the taxpayer's udder. I privately challenged him, suggesting that all it showed was that Tories had a better cultural understanding of accountancy and fraud. They know enough not to forge bills or signatures, and that there are more subtle ways to maximise advantage. To his credit, he later wrote back to say that a former Tory cabinet minister with whom he had discussed the point agreed with me.

But apathetic and angry voters should know who they are dealing with. MacShane was shopped by an ex-copper turned BNP candidate, and again by Guido Fawkes, the rightwing ("libertarian") Tory blogger. The police dropped his case after a 20-month investigation, but reopened it after Lyons' report based on the same evidence. They or the Crown Prosecution Service briefed the press that the by-then-ex-MP tried to use parliamentary privilege to block them, something he has repeatedly denied. No one has suggested that MacShane was lining his pockets (or his sons' or partner's), merely claiming expenses he was not entitled to.

But if I were forced to choose (thankfully I'm not) between the BNP, Guido Fawkes or Nigel Farage (if Ukip is the answer, we are asking the wrong question) and MacShane and Chris Mullin I know whose side I'd be on. As for Russell Brand and Simon Cowell with their don't vote, anti-education cynicism, they're on the plutocrats' side too – though poor Russ probably doesn't realise yet.

The current pay regime at Westminster is likely to reinforce a return to more oligarchical habits – the days a century or so ago when most politicians were rich enough not to need a salary (MPs were first paid £400 a year in 1906). It's called the law of unintended consequences and would suit the plutocrats just fine.

There is much about which voters can get cross with politicians. The failure to solve London's airport needs or the HS2 controversy are two examples. The looming crisis over energy supply – wind? gas? coal? nuclear? – is another instance of dither. But these situations arise not because politicians don't listen to voters, but because they listen to their conflicting demands and a cynical press too much – and are afraid to act.

It's what we pay them to do on our behalf (though not enough).

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Politics Weekly podcast: 'clocking on' in the Lords, airport expansion and 2013 in politics

As the political year draws to a close we review the year in Westminster. It ends with a new allowances furore in the House of Lords after a Conservative peer was filmed clocking in to claim his £300 day rate – then clocking straight out again. Lord Hanningfield says he was unwell when he was filmed – and that in any case, much of his parliamentary work can be done from outside the confines of Westminster.

There is no suggestion that the former Conservative broke any rules but but a Labour MP has called for parliamentary authorities to investigate.

Meanwhile a new row is brewing over Britain's airport capacity. The airports commission, chaired by economist Howard Davies, shortlisted options and favoured a new runway at Heathrow. Party leaders are sensitive to the many marginal constituencies which would be affected by a new west London runway and no decision will be taken till after the next election.

Joining Tom Clark for the final podcast of 2013 are Guardian columnists Martin Kettle, Jonathan Freedland and Michael White.

Also this week: we circle some dates on our 2014 political calendars - including May's European elections and September's Scottish referendum. Will the economic recovery continue to power on towards the next election? And will its effects be felt by the average voter?

Leave your thoughts below

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Boris Johnson stirs up London airport debate

Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin hoped to send MPs to sleep, but London mayor woke them up

Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin is a doggedly decent politician whose only ambition on Tuesday was to make a dull holding statement about options for London's expanding airport needs and send fellow MPs back to sleep. Bad luck, Patrick.

Not only did his appeal to MPs to "engage positively" with the latest proposals fall upon ears long deafened by noise from Heathrow, but by sheer coincidence Boris Johnson, Heathrow's doughtiest critic, was addressing a press gallery lunch a few yards away. McLoughlin was like those plucky British paratroopers dropped to capture a bridge-too-far in 1944 only to land on a Panzer division unexpectedly resting at Arnhem.

Panzer Boris had already blitzed the morning's media, attacking Sir Howard Davies's report for paying only lip service to the London mayor's rival solution, the £100bn Boris Island wheeze. Expanding Heathrow would be "an unforgivable mistake" and turn the capital into a "living hell", he had predicted – as if it isn't that already.

How could the mayor raise the rhetorical stake and justify the bike ride back to old Westminster haunts? By grabbing anything to hand and turning it into a joke as usual, that was how. Boris duly recalled that plans for a magnificent neo-gothic Palace of Westminster had been dismissed as a costly vanity project (£2m and rising) after the fire of 1834 by top columnist Charles Dickens among others. It is now one of the most photographed buildings in the world.

"So will it be with Thames estuary airport. I predict that when it is finally done, people will marvel – not that it was built, but why we delayed so long," he said. Boris Island as the 21st century's Houses of Parliament? That could be a hard sell to voters.

Had the Treasury nobbled Davies to exclude Boris Island, someone asked? "I have no idea." You just said someone did. "Did I say that?" Cries of: "Yes you did. Who put pressure on him?"

Realising he was in danger of making news, Boris replied: "Me." He had persuaded Davies not to reject the estuary option (not quite).

He did not stop there, he never does. The greatest city in the world is "hamstrung in the global race" (Boris gracefully attributed the cliche to David Cameron) by its inability to match six daily flights from Helsinki to China.

Do Chinese investors and tourists want to fly to Helsinki or London? "Since the Olympics we have been fighting them off with a stick," he said. Falling crime, Crossrail, more US banks than New York, Bikram yoga centres, who could resist London?

It took some prodding to get him to talk about London's acute housing shortage, its gross inequalities. He is against both, just as he is against Heathrow expansion. It would close the M25 for years and guarantee that aircraft full of would-be investors "pointlessly spew kerosene into the upper air over Croydon … Much as I love Croydon, it's lovely, but I think inward investors can get too much of it." He kept mentioning Croydon.

Lively stuff, but not vintage Johnson. Asked if he would be a Tory leadership contender or even an MP again in 2015, he was strangely diffident. Mumble, mumble. Had he been chastened by Boris Island's rejection? Or had he belatedly become a statesman?

Not quite. Mention of Nick Clegg lit the blue touch paper. He called him a radio disc jockey with only light ceremonial duties, Cameron's lapdog who has been "converted by taxidermy into a kind of protective shield, like the Emperor Valerian [AD200-260] who was skinned and hung on the wall".

No Johnson speech is complete without a classical allusion. And Valerian is said to be the first Roman emperor to postpone a decision on Heathrow.

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MPs try hard with a vengeance

In the House of Commons, home secretary Theresa May undergoes interrogation

MPs were reminded of the demonic cruelty perpetrated against its own people by the communist regime in North Korea where the uncle of the boy ruler, Kim Jong-un, has been executed for plotting to seize power and enjoying a depraved life that includes gambling and page three girls.

Did it make MPs grateful that under the relatively benign autocracy of David Cameron plotters such as Boris Johnson and Nick Clegg go unpunished, and that voters are still free to refuse mass indoctrination by the regime's own shadowy strongman, Uncle Rupert? No it did not.

Far from being either cowed or grateful a small, politically motivated band of them took the home secretary hostage in retaliation for her refusal to hand over a suspected security threat, M15 chief Andrew Parker. They then interrogated her for two hours in a vain search for information they'd hoped to get from him.

Time and time again members of the notorious home affairs select committee asked Theresa May the same questions, hoping she would crack. Does she want to impose a cap on the free movement of workers from the EU? Not right this minute. Is the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, a menace for publishing Edward Snowden's datamining leaks? Definitely, though May was unable to say quite why, except that Parker had said so.

And why won't you let Parker give his own explanation to them as well as to the intelligence and security committee? This was a tough one because even Rusbridger-baiting Tories such as Michael Ellis were offended by it. May kept saying it is because that's the way it's done, not because the intelligence committee agrees the questions (and possibly the answers) in advance.

Perhaps Rusbridger is right, Ellis suggested in an attempt to get her to say something interesting. It failed.

Dressed in an expensive wool suit, the Vivienne Westwood of the coalition survived her ordeal with only a few bruises, though she may need therapy over her treatment by the committee's chairman, Keith Vaz. When May said Rusbridger's misconduct was "by definition obvious", Vaz purred "it may be to you" but he wanted evidence. When she complained he was "dancing on the head of a pin", he said: " I'm not dancing.'' Shame! Publicity-hungry Vaz could win Strictly Come Dancing alone. Pique, it was definitely pique. If Vaz had a white cat he'd have stroked it.

But the maddest moment came when Labour's Ian Austin asked how she had come to appoint as a responsible Home Office minister a "fantasist" who believes the police, government, security services and the Women's Institute (I made that one up) all conspired to murder weapons scientist Dr David Kelly? This could only be Lib Dem Norman Baker, the man who makes M15's Parker sound normal.

Conspiracy theorists believe Baker was dumped on May to ruin her career, as a punishment for plotting against Dave. As vengeance goes it is not in North Korea's league, but is not bad for Whitehall. May sweetly called Baker an excellent minister.

"Presumably you send him a Christmas card," said torturer-in-chief, Vaz. "I believe I sent you one too," she answered. When MPs turned to the real thing – North Korea – they angrily demanded action against the rogue regime in Pyongyang, not easy for a cash-strapped nation 5,000 miles away and with only 28 soldiers and four grounded helicopters available for a taskforce.

Far more menacing they also want the BBC to join the attack, even Tory MPs who usually see the Beeb as Kim Jong-un's propaganda wing. Some MPs want the BBC to divert its executives redundo slush fund to pump out World Service radio news in Korean. Others demanded that BBC drama, science and nature programmes be used to undermine Kim's regime. St David of Attenborough? Dara ó Briain's Science Club? Downton Abbey? Haven't they suffered enough?

Theresa MayKeith VazEdward SnowdenNorth KoreaMichael White
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George Osborne faces the Awkward Squad of Steel

Andrew Tyrie proves again he is a member of an elite band of Kryptonians left on Earth to expose governmental incompetence

George Osborne is a clever fellow, as he would be the first to admit under the threat of torture such as, for example, being forced to hear his deputy, Danny Alexander, play bagpipes. He was the first of Gordon Brown's many Tory shadow chancellors to rattle Labour's financial Ozymandias by teasing him as if he was Ozzy Osbourne.

But one of the many burdens Osborne has inherited from the Brown era is the right of backbench MPs to elect select committee chairfolk, instead of feebly allowing the whips to do it. Left to themselves the whips would have saddled the public accounts committee (Pac) with streetwise Michael Meacher as chairman, instead of Britain's most ferocious pensioner, Marge "Bring Up the Bodies" Hodge.

As for the Treasury select committee (TSC), the whips would surely have picked rugged Michael Fabricant for his technical grasp of the Divisia broad measure of money supply, which has shown a troubling increase since late 2011. Instead MPs elected Andrew Tyrie, a brainy Tory who knows a bitcoin from a bubble. He is also a member of the all-party Awkward Squad (Life President: Tam Dalyell), an elite band of Kryptonians left on Earth to expose the incompetent workings of government from the backbenches. Tragically, they are usually recalled to Krypton before their work is done.

The chancellor was in an expansive mood when he appeared before the TSC on Thursday to discuss the presentational triumph of his credit-purchased autumn statement. His new hairstyle, the Michael Portillo (circa 1987) Pudding Basin Look, has bedded down and he waved his long, elegant fingers expressively as he batted off a series of questions from some smart MPs, plus Labour's John Mann.

The trouble was that Krypton-to-Chichester's Tyrie has the chairman's prerogative to interrupt whenever he feels like it. He often does. Watching him was like watching an only slightly sadistic headmaster telling a slippery member of the pimply lower sixth that he'd marked down a sloppy essay from AAA to just above a junk bond. When the SNP's Stewart Hosie, one of several smart Scots on Osborne's case, complained of an "extraordinarily evasive" answer Tyrie told him with a worldly chuckle that chancellors have been peddling that one for a century. He's heard them all, has old Tyrie.

Krypton's Wackford Squeers opened the interrogation with a mild question about ringfenced budgets like health and GCHQ. With an election looming, aren't all the parties tempted to bribe the voters – "isn't ringfencing good politics, but bad economics?" he asked Osborne. It was a dagger in the chancellor's breast, virtually an accusation that he had been shoplifting at Harrods. Everyone knows George does politics 24/7. That Help to Buy scheme is blatant.

"I don't accept your distinction," he replied before waffling on about embracing voter priorities (health) and "investing" in education. Pure Gordon Brown as usual: Brown was just the same, always "investing" in schemes to get him into No 10.

John Mann came to No 11's rescue with a string of stupid questions. More cerebral colleagues followed. Osborne handled most well in a smug sort of way. But headmaster Tyrie kept yanking his chain with that thin, superior smile which Kryptonians mistake for warmth. Are you sure your Help to Buy scheme (good politics, but bad economics, anyone?) isn't "adding vodka to the punch bowl just as the party gets going?" he asked sweetly. Osborne said it wasn't. He would, wouldn't he ?

And a breakdown of energy bills to help consumers, would that be a good idea? Tyrie later asked. Osborne Minor said he'd do it after cricket practice. Right at the end, Tyrie asked again about Help to Buy. Does the Bank of England have a veto or not? Osborne said it does and, there again, it doesn't. Not for nothing do Cameron groupies call the Chichester Kryptonian "Andrew Tiresome".

George OsborneConservativesMichael White
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Miliband and Cameron find something to agree on: no pay rises for MPs

It's a Christmas miracle as party leaders share a view – but there's less enthusiasm from their backbenchers

Ed Miliband pulled off a little Christmas miracle at question time. The Labour leader got David Cameron to agree with him and then he agreed back with the PM. What's more, he managed to reduce normally baying backbenchers to silence at the same time.

What topic or festive feeling could have produced such a result? Mince pies laced with temazepam? Perish the thought. That selfie photo that Cameron and Barack Obama shared at the Mandela memorial with Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Denmark's real-life Birgitte Nyborg? No, Cameron joked that he only agreed to be photographed with Neil Kinnock's glamorous daughter-in-law because Mandela believed in bringing opponents together.

Could it have been the prime minister finally deciding that Miliband is right to highlight falling living standards on his watch? Wrong again. Cameron trotted out a familiar string of reasons why jobs are more plentiful this Christmas, petrol cheaper, taxes lower, the deficit down. And when Ed Balls started bellowing "IT'S GOING DOWN" with a violent thumbs-down gesture (he meant average pay, not taxes), Dave said: "I'll tell you what's going down: his career."

No. What produced the Miliband Miracle was the content of MPs' 2015 Christmas stockings, the 11% pay rise that Ipsa, their independent pay board, has proposed for after the election. Miliband is appalled, as well he might be in hard times. So are Cameron and Nick Clegg. "I agree with the right honourable gentleman," Cameron replied.

Agree? Dogs howled, share prices tumbled and robins fell from the sky at such unparliamentary language. But Cameron pushed on to menace the much-vaunted independence of Ipsa for coming up with the wrong answer. Ipsa was hastily set up after the MPs' expenses scandal in order to grind their faces into their moats and duck houses, not to be nice to them. Damn!

Ed agreed with Dave and Dave agreed back. They're ganging up to take Ipsa down a dark alley and threaten its family: "Nice little Ipsas you've got here, shame if they fell down a well."

Cross-party statesmanship in action? Not quite. MPs who are not married to high-end lawyers or heiresses like Dave, Ed and Nick don't share their leaders' enthusiasm. They went strangely silent and stayed that way until the usual knuckle-dragging ding-dong resumed over the voters' cost of living.

Who would dare to speak up for £74,000-a-year MPs? No one would. Even in the days when they set their own pay it was never the right time, which is why the average Foxton estate agent coins in so much more than them. Yet the Thatcherite former cabinet minister Peter Lilley had a sly crack at the task with a self-funded productivity rise.

At 70 Lilley is too old to care what his Hertfordshire voters think. How about re-introducing the boundaries plan to cut 50 MPs from the current total of 650 – "which would simultaneously pay for any increase and increase the workload of MPs?" the mild-mannered veteran suggested.

It was the perfect Thatcherite solution: sack some workers and make the rest work harder. It has happened to millions of us since 1979. But it was Clegg who torpedoed boundary reforms last time round and Cameron could have said so. Instead he chose to blame Labour, with whom he has no plans to enter a coalition after 2015.

When the house had all but emptied a clutch of specialist MPs got stuck into the details of the much-amended bank reform bill, the one designed to curb the dirtier habits of bankers who wouldn't get out of bed for an MP's salary. Labour's belated efforts to tighten the screw will be counter-productive, warned Tories: "The horse has bolted. We now have to devise a stable door that can keep the next horse in," they said. Somehow it sounded less than reassuring.

PMQsMPs' expensesDavid CameronEd MilibandPublic sector payHouse of CommonsMichael White
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