Rishi gets his ear chewed – but not in the Russian way

Say what you like about Russia, but we could learn a thing or two from their policing methods.

All the suspects in the Moscow shooting seem to have fallen down the stairs, one so badly he ate his own ear.

Torture in Britain is subtler but crueller. 

Once a term, three times a year, we have the PM interrogated by the liaison committee, bringing together the heads of 14 lesser committees that cover everything from “levelling up” to “immigration” to “wine and port” (the latter is headed by Sir Molyneux Crisp, who has worked tirelessly to put Wensleydale on the map).

It’s an exercise in absurdity, underscored by the PM’s growing reliance on spectacles: thick-rimmed and attached to a beaky nose beneath thick black eyebrows, he looks disconcertingly like Groucho Marx.

The session begins, as always, with an economics committee complaining about rising debt.

Then the other 13 take it in turns to ask for more money; for courts, for Wales, for research into the marketability of Somerset Brie. 

The PM, who loves his sums, grows weary. He snaps: if you ask for more cash, “it is incumbent upon colleagues to explain which department they think that increase should come at the expense of and which taxes should be raised to pay for it.”

Oh, there’s a committee for discussing that, Prime Minister. They spend their time passing cakes and eating bucks.

A joke now from William Wragg, a sardonic fellow whose mastery of procedure and insider gags evokes the kind of sixth-former who memorises Tom Lehrer lyrics. 

Was your predecessor – Liz Truss – “undermined by the deep state?” he drawls. “Is there a deep state? Are you part of it?!”

If I were, replies the PM, “I wouldn’t tell you”, causing the room to chortle.

Perhaps Ms Truss’s conspiracy thinking is the result of “a few chaps getting over-excited after a good lunch at, say, the Garrick,” whimsies Wragg, forgetting that the reason why that reference is topical is the club doesn’t allow ladies like Liz to join.

Well, the state might not be deep but, watching the liaison committee, I conclude it is thick and spreading. 

Britain once ran an empire with 14 civil servants and a parrot called Cecil. Now the committee of a hundred committees discusses capping Civil Service numbers at “488,000”, all in the context of historic taxes and spending. It’s a situation that is not only unconservative but positively Soviet.

Bernard Jenkin, the chairman, spoke impenetrable mandarin about “embedding a strategic culture in Whitehall”, proposing the creation of a “national school for government”. If building a school to teach faceless bureaucrats how to manage our lives isn’t “deepy statey”, I’ve no idea what is.

Tragically, said Sir Bernard, “younger generations feel very disengaged from politics”. Several of the young people in the audience were, indeed, fast asleep. 

The PM endured his inquisition with a brave face, then dashed off to do something useful, and the committee drifted away to sample some of Sir Molyneux’s delicious Red Leicester.