QUENTIN LETTS: Snapping like Lily Savage, Esther McVey cut him down in a trice

Last weekend, it was International Men’s Day – when the world’s sniffling milquetoasts have their moment.

For 24 hours, once a year, everyone has to be kind to Walter the Softy. Or, as we call him at Westminster, Oliver Dowden.

Mr Dowden, rather amazingly, is the deputy prime minister. A drippier tap would be hard to find. You may remember ‘La-Di-Dah’ Gunner Graham, the pianist in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, or Charles Hawtrey, star of the Carry On films. Both, by comparison to Mr Dowden, were muscular creations.

‘Olive’, as Mr Dowden is known in Whitehall, came flapping in for morning questions at the Commons yesterday, accompanied by various ministerial colleagues at the Cabinet Office. A mallard with her ducklings.

Among those underlings – not that they would quite see themselves as that – was Esther McVey, newly restored to Downing Street’s top table. She has been made ‘minister for common sense’.

As a slaughterhouse worker approaches a ram, so did Ms McVey step to the despatch box

She flexed her hands, cast a pitiless eye at Ms McGovern, and sliced her in two

Common sense? ‘I appreciate that the concept is difficult for Opposition members to grasp,’ she snapped in her Lily Savage voice

As Alison McGovern (Lab, Wirral South) noted, about ten days after everyone else made the joke, the appointment of a minister for common sense seemed to imply that no one else at No 10 had any.

As a slaughterhouse worker approaches a ram, so did Ms McVey step to the despatch box. She flexed her hands, cast a pitiless eye at Ms McGovern, and sliced her in two.

Common sense? ‘I appreciate that the concept is difficult for Opposition members to grasp,’ she snapped in her Lily Savage voice.

‘I’m committed to delivering common-sense decisions such as delaying the ban on petrol and diesel cars, delaying the ban on oil and gas boilers, scrapping HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester, reducing the overseas budget – all common-sense policies that those on the opposite benches have voted against.’

Next up was Andrew Gwynne (Lab, Denton and Reddish). Brave but expendable. The sort of character who in cowboy films used to get shot just before the intermission.

He took a tilt at glamorous Esther but she soon cut him down, saying the Government had just introduced ‘the biggest permanent tax cuts in modern British history – cutting taxes, not like the Opposition, who want more borrowing and spending’. An undertaker sprang to the scene with a tape measure for Mr Gwynne.

Labour frontbencher Nick Thomas-Symonds seized his buckler and went to class war with Ms McVey. He made digs about Rishi Sunak’s helicopter and the Tories’ support for private schools.

Ms McVey, an unashamed working-class believer in aspiration, dealt with him as a steamroller would flatten a worm cast.

Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden (File Photo)

If parents wanted to send their children to private schools, that was freedom of choice, she said. If Labour forced such schools to shut, it would only mean that the public sector would have to find billions to accommodate displaced pupils. Mr Thomas-Symonds, like Monty Python’s knight, departed in numerous pieces.

Sadly, that was all we heard from Ms McVey. Most of the question-time was hogged by moss-damp Dowden and his prosaic understudy John Glen. But it was not long before we had another indomitable woman at the despatch box: Penny Mordaunt, leader of the Commons, for weekly business questions.

First she dealt briskly with her shadow, Lucy Powell. Then we had the customary brutality of her exchanges with the SNP’s Deidre Brock. These Thursday exchanges have become terrible punishment beatings and ended this time with an imperious denunciation of the ‘slopey-shouldered separatism of the SNP’. Any boxing ref would have stepped in a lot earlier to stop the carnage.

Westminster is not short of strong women at present. Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, is twice the parliamentarian Sir Keir Starmer is. Rachel Reeves has Sir Keir’s voice but a throatier version.

The Tories, in addition to the McVey-Mordaunt combo, have Suella Braverman (currently deep in her tent, brewing noxious cauldrons). They also, more positively, have Therese Coffey, who left office on the same day as Suella was sacked but has refused to complain and has thrown herself into the backbench fray. She gave an SNP man, Peter Grant (Glenrothes), a firm biffing yesterday.

Having a male deputy PM is pathetic tokenism.

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