Twilight Zone PMQs

Charlotte Gore beat me to the punch in expressing exasperation at todays PMQs.

Today this pretence of answering questions was utterly abandoned. Brown’s responses to Cameron were pure attack – ranting about Tory policies and plans, rebuking Cameron with the PMQ’s equivalent of “Oh yeah? Well YOU SMELL.”

Quite.

In fact, at times it was confusing to work out whether Brown was addressing David Cameron at all, or burbling a random set of sentences created by some Babelfish style political soundbite generator.

But then perhaps my focus wasn't as it should be, considering I was listening on my shonky in-car [intermittently] stereo, whilst negotiating precarious, and occasionally treacherous, roads at the speed of your average maiden aunt Nissan Micra Sunday driver, in the company of kids who should have been at closed schools, whilst the snow continued to pile up all around.

It was a bit of a surprise, then, when Labour trained monkey Nia Griffith chose today, of all days, to dolly one up for the PM ask a searching question about Copenhagen which culminated thus.

"... what action can my right honourable friend tell us he will be taking in order to keep the momentum up on the absolutely vital task of tackling climate change"

That Brown then talked of 'rising temperatures' just heightened that suspicion of having slipped into a distinctly surreal episode of the Twilight Zone.

And with subsequent contributions addressing the sparse provision of salt for the roads, and the boiler scrappage scheme "given the cold weather", one must wonder whether many of the 646 possess any understanding of irony or sense of timing. If not, surely it's time to pare down the number of MPs to a level whereby we are served by a select number of quality debaters, rather than an inefficient rump comprising a hefty smattering of pre-programmed, non-lateral thinking drones.