QUENTIN LETTS: Mount Hoyle erupted! Dark smoke started rising, then the top of the Speaker's head shot hundreds of feet in the air
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Mount Hoyle erupted seconds after the end of Prime Minister's Questions. It was one of the most volcanic discharges the Commons has known.
One moment the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was presiding in an avuncular manner over the last dribblings of a forgettable PMQs at which backbench MPs kept raising constituents' medical complaints. Please, this is parliament, not a community clinic. Andy Burnham did his best to sound interested in the various ailments but there is only so much an Englishman can do when asked about womb problems.
Sparrows played in the trees. A gentle breeze blew through the palm trees. Despite the distressing medical bulletins, all seemed relatively peaceful.
It was at that point that those of us who sit in the gallery detected a smell of sulphur. Dark smoke started rising from the Speaker's upper slopes. Sparrows fled, tidal waters ebbed and moments later the top of Sir Lindsay's head shot hundreds of feet in the air, heading towards the Polynesian islands.
Vulcanologists will tell you eruptions are an inevitable part of life in the shadow of Mt Hoyle but this one was not expected. Its cause? The scurvy attitude of Miatta Fahnbulleh, our new Energy Secretary. She should have been in the chamber to make a Commons statement about the Jackdaw gas field, which the Government had approved after much thumb-twiddling and Labour anxiety about upsetting the Greens.
Ms Fahnbulleh – who is rumoured to have hated having to let Jackdaw happen – was absent. She had buggered off to Aberdeen for a photo opportunity.
In her place stood Michael Shanks, a ministerial underling. Mr Shanks is not a bad lad but he is not the Secretary of State. Worse, the Jackdaw decision had been in the morning's newspapers. Sir Lindsay was angry about this. He felt it should have been disclosed first to the House. He felt, furthermore, that Miss La-di-dah Fancypants Fahnbulleh should have had the courtesy to be there herself rather than sending ill-shaven Shanks.
One moment the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was presiding in an avuncular manner over the last dribblings of a forgettable PMQs, but the next moment he erupted with anger...
The cause of his rage was the absence of new Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, who should have been there to make a statement about the Jackdaw gas field, but was instead in Aberdeen
The eruption, once started, gathered force. Vulcanologists have a scale for this sort of thing. The mildest classification is 'Hawaiian' (effusive), rising to 'Strombolian' (explosive) and 'Pelean' (catastrophic). This was more like Plinian (cataclysmic). Great boulders shot forth from Sir Lindsay's crater. At first he spoke from a script. That was soon discarded as the action hotted up. His anger acquired a self-perpetuating energy as he raged at Ms Fahnbulleh's 'shameful' behaviour, her 'immense discourtesy' and the 'appalling treatment' she had meted out to the elected legislature. 'It's simply not good enough!' thundered Lancashire's Vesuvius, stabbing a stubby finger into (and through) his crumpled script.
Labour Whips leaned back in their nearby seats, eyebrows singed. Sir Lindsay was gabbling so much that he almost swallowed his own flailing tongue. Mr Shanks, once a schoolmaster, cowered. The parliamentary clerks gripped their laptops lest the devices take flight under the gale of Sir Lindsay's ire. On it went for more than two minutes.
A lull allowed Mr Shanks to rise, quivering, to the despatch box and essay a few first words of apology. Too soon! Sir Lindsay erupted again, sarcastically saying he was 'sorry that Aberdeen is more important than the MPs who have been elected'. Mr Shanks, caught by hot spume, was thereafter capable of little more than a few squeaks from within a lava sarcophagus.
Ms Fahnbulleh, 47, who is close to Ed Miliband, has had quite a week. She is one of the Cabinet ministers who has undermined the Home Secretary's attempts to curb immigration. She is also that one who sends her children to private school, even though Labour wages class war against such establishments. As hard-Leftists go, she is strikingly pukka. Her father was once a government minister in Liberia. He is said to have made a few bob in, oh I say, the oil industry.
If she were truly concerned about global warming, should pleased-with-herself Miatta not be more careful about igniting such hot gases from our beloved Speaker?
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