RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yes, really: Jeremy Corbyn, that paragon of progressive virtue, captured on camera spitting a sexist insult. From up in the gallery, you could see it spread across the chamber: MPs on both sides goggling at their screens, and then showing their neighbours. On the Labour side, little huddles formed and swapped anxious whispers. Perhaps they were brainstorming an explanation for their leader to use. “Actually Mr Speaker, what I said was ‘Stupendous woman.’ Despite our differences politically, I can’t help but admire the Prime Minister for the way that, in deeply trying circumstances, she always—”

The first MP to mention it out loud was Paul Scully (Con, Sutton & Cheam). Did Mrs May, he asked, think it was acceptable for an MP to use the phrase “stupid woman”?

Mrs May had been busy answering questions, so she couldn’t have seen the video, but a colleague must have passed her a note about it, because she seemed to know what Mr Scully was alluding to. All MPs, she said darkly, with just the briefest glance in the direction of Mr Corbyn, “should use appropriate language when referring to female members”.

To which Mr Corbyn, believe it or not, nodded earnestly, and mouthed: “Quite right.”

At last PMQs ended. Instantly, half the Tory benches leapt up to complain to John Bercow, the Speaker, about Mr Corbyn. To their consternation, he didn’t want to know. “Order!” he yawned. “No, no! Points of order come after ministerial statements…”

Tories gaped, and fumed, and pointed, and roared “Shame! SHAME!” And, as they did so, Mr Corbyn scuttled out of the chamber, without a word.

The moment the Labour leader had gone, Mr Bercow suddenly decided that he would listen to points of order, after all. Now the Tories were raging. If anything, they seemed even angrier about Mr Bercow than they were about Mr Corbyn. Sir Patrick McLoughlin (Con, Derbyshire Dales) protested that only days earlier the Speaker had issued each MP with a booklet sternly setting out the correct way to behave in the chamber. Shouldn’t he order Mr Corbyn to come back and apologise immediately?

To Tory indignation, Mr Bercow insisted that he hadn’t seen the incident. And then, to still louder indignation, he suggested that the next point of order be “on an unrelated matter”.

And in a way, it was. Because it wasn’t about Mr Corbyn. It was about Mr Bercow.

“Why is it,” Andrea Leadsom asked him acidly, “that when an Opposition member found that you called me a ‘stupid woman’, you didn’t apologise in this Chamber?”

Of course. Back in May, the Speaker had faced the exact same accusation as Mr Corbyn. “Ooooooh!” chorused MPs.

“I dealt with that matter months ago!” yelped Mr Bercow desperately. But he was drowning. Anna Soubry (Con, Broxtowe) said that if a Tory MP had mouthed “stupid woman”, Mr Bercow would have punished him immediately. Tories thundered their agreement. More and more of them shot up to complain, and stood at the Speaker’s side waving their phones, demanding he watch the video straight away. No doubt they were genuinely upset about Mr Corbyn. But it also felt as if a vast underground reservoir of pent-up Tory frustration – about Brexit, about their party, and indeed about the Speaker – was bursting through the surface, in a geyser of scalding fury.