May 21

I re-read my piece from yesterday, which was perhaps my most pessimistic piece all year. There is not a chance I can pick up the tone, especially because of three separate activities in This Place today.

Activity One: Lord Call Me Dave answering his fellow peers in The Other Place. He got stuck into the ICC’s judgement that both Hamas and Israel had committed crimes against humanity, saying that this would do nothing to help both sides, be they Israeli hostage or Gazan family. At one stage he started banging the despatch box, to prove how seriously he is taking his obligations, much as he did when he hawked Lex Greensill’s funds.

The party line seems to be to avoid moral equivalence between the two sides, and if anyone knows about morals, it’s the man who appointed Andy Coulson as his Head of Comms when he was PM. Whatever next, Austerity Osborne brought back as Shadow Chancellor?

Activity Two: Gullis on buses. What must Lord Dave think of the party he once led? In his day, Jonathan Gullis was a glint in the eye of Conservatism; now he’s one of the loudest louts, a Crabbe or Goyle in a party full of Malfoys and malcontents, one of whom (Suella Braverman) was ticked off by a High Court judge today, which ironically only makes her prospects of becoming party leader even more likely.

Mr Gullis was granted a Westminster Hall debate on the British bus network, giving him a chance to grandstand to no more than half-a-dozen members who had been strongarmed into supporting him so that he was not speaking to an empty room. The alteration of bus timetables have helped drive rural bus usage down, including for his Stoke-on-Trent constituents; to his credit, he did win funding for an improvement plan. But why do we need a debate purely to help big himself up and provide material for his newsletter to prove he is doing as he was elected to do?

Ultimately, Mr G came off as akin to an irate councillor or, as he actually was before entering This Place, a downtrodden schoolteacher railing against the status quo. Reform UK would love to have him.

Activity Three: the full debate on compensation for victims of the Infected Blood scandal. Dame Diana Johnson’s contribution was to remind MPs to remember them, and how there ought to be ‘no decision about us without us’. Why then, she asked, is there an opacity in the expert advisory panel?

Actually, it’s worth mentioning Activity Four: two former ambassadors to several African nations discussing Civil Societies. I pointed out to Vish and Em that it’s jolly rich coming from us to call anyone else a civil society. Maybe we in our faded Empire hide behind Parliament and all the pageantry and pomp.