Department for Communities and Local Government Questions, 30 January
According to the latest installment of bien pensant Westminster opinion, parliament is resurgent. This status update comes by virtue of its triumph in forcing Stephen Hester, the Chief Executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, to scrape by on only his £1 million salary, foregoing those little extra luxuries brought to him by his £1 million bonus.
Such sacrifice, we are told, is the result of inexplicably awesome powers unleashed by Ed Miliband when he threatened a vote in the House of Commons on the subject. Since Mr Miliband was also a member of the Cabinet responsible for the contract that put the RBS boss in line for his £1 million bonus in the first place, we can only assume that Mr Hester has detected in the Labour leader the supreme authority for determining how much he is going to get paid, and saw that there was no point in doing anything but bow down before it. The question therefore arises whether the mana exists within Parliament itself, or merely within Mr Miliband. One way of testing Parliament's claim to supremacy would be to visit this font of earthly power in its more ordinary garb - and it can hardly appear more mundane than on the occasion of questions to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.
At first glance at two-thirty on a slow Monday afternoon, the place did not appear to be especially graced by supernumerary strength. There were 30 or so backbenchers sprawled across the government benches and perhaps a dozen representing the opposition. That the government side appeared packed by comparison could not be explained only by the disparity in numbers: the weight of advantage was also accounted for by the stomach belonging to Tony Baldry, the Conservative member for Banbury, which spread generously across an expanse of seating in all directions of the compass. It is a good thing the planning minister was in attendance. Mr Baldry's abdomen constituted the type of green bench development that must surely contravene several sets of regulations on overspill.
Nor was the conversation inspiring. Indeed, for much of the time the session resembled nothing so much as a Daily Express reader's video fantasy: a lot of middle-class people talking about house prices. Sarah Wollaston, who represents Totnes in the Tory interest, was typical of the tone. House prices in her constituency, she informed the minister, were some 16 times the national average income, and what was he going to do about it? How one longed for the reply: "we have plans to locate in the South Hams district a national repository where we will send for indefinite storage the entire stock of the country's radioactive nuclear waste. This should bring the ratio down to something approaching closer to three to one". Instead there was one of those endlessly prattling replies about the many wonderful things the Government is doing to increase the supply of affordable housing. Dr Wollaston seemed satisfied with this answer - more satisfied presumably than she would have been with the nuclear waste plan - though one doubts whether her prosperous constituents see the fancy price tags on their homes as quite the source of deep social malaise as does their member of parliament. If the mansion tax idea ever gets going, Vince Cable won't be able to holiday on the Devon riviera without an armed guard.
The minister answering was Mr Grant Shapps, a rather self-assured young man, who likes to share the details of his busy and fascinating life with his followers on Twitter. As a result, I feel that I have attended more meetings with the residents' associations of Hatfield and Welwyn Garden City than has Mr Shapps himself. An ambitious fellow, he makes sure that he conforms to one of the two types of minister that is mandated at the Department of Communities and Local Government: the sturdy and the sleek. Mr Shapps is a sleek; so too is Mr Greg Clark, who was dressed almost identically in pale blue shirt and pastel blue tie. The older sleek was represented by Andrew Stunell, the Lib Dem on the team. His tie was pastel too: a rather sweet pale yellow, demonstrating in its colour party allegiance and in its shade deference to their rating in the polls.
Naturally enough, the leader of the DLG sturdies is the captain of the ship, Eric Pickles. His fellow sturdy is Bob Neil, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary, who was allowed to the despatch box on just one occasion to bellow at a Labour backbencher who had displeased him (the topic I forget, but it was probably house prices). If Mr Pickles were a Russian doll and you unscrewed his outer shell, then Mr Neil would be exactly what you would expect to find at the next layer down
With reckless disregard to his sturdy status, Mr Pickles led off on his first question - rather unwisely in my view - with a long list of the "finest restaurants in the country" which he claimed had been visited by his Labour predecessors. Listening to Pickles, life at local government under Labour was a never-ending round of gastronomic expedition. Soon enough he had left Labour ministers behind, quietly belching at L'Escargot, and was off on a Michelin tour of places dined at by the Audit Commission. At one such establishment - an oyster bar - they had even lost the receipt, the Secretary of State chortled. Mr Pickles, of course, would never do such a thing - though he is even less likely to have mislaid an oyster.
At least, however, Pickles' answers to questions sound as if they might remotely come from a human being. So often ministers in the wilder reaches of departmental questions talk in the uniform robotic lingo of jargon and cliche that makes you want to boil them down for glue.
This modulation was true even as Pickles finished up his contribution with a question that required him to talk about something called "troublesome families coordinators". In the hands of a lesser speaker, this would have sounded like one of those ghastly left-over new Labour innovations that the age of austerity is supposed to polish off. From Mr Pickles though, the idea sounded rather appealing and you were left wondering whether it wouldn't be possible to hire one out for Boxing Day.