Experience negotiating with fearsome warlords in Nigeria makes parliament a doddle

This parliamentary committee angered Andrew Mitchell - but he kept a lid on it

If nothing else the questioning of the country’s top taxperson was a study in exasperation today. Understandably, the Commons Public Accounts Committee was eager, desperate even, to find out from Lin Homer, HMRC’s chief executive, how it was that Starbucks managed to pay a trifling £8.6million in corporation tax on UK sales of - wait for it - £398million.

The Independent's sketchwriter writes about renting a property to Denis MacShane, who resigned as an MP today over submitting false expense claims

There was a poignant, almost-tear jerking moment yesterday during the horror show that was Energy Questions when the former (and sacked) Minister of State Charles Hendry rose to express his –and among Tory MPs increasingly rare – support for wind farms, pointing out, reasonably enough, that even fabulously oil rich countries like Norway, Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan were investing in them.

There's nothing the House of Commons likes more than to relive the battles of the past. As Dennis Skinner put it during yesterday's Europe debate, it was "almost a replay" of the great crisis over the Maastricht Treaty nearly 20 years ago. Earlier, Ed Miliband had ominously, if crudely, invoked that heady period by telling David Cameron that he was "weak abroad... weak at home. It is John Major all over again".

Overlooked by the portrait of William Pitt addressing MPs, which dominates Committee Room 6 in the Palace of Westminster, something historic is happening – almost without publicity.

Tom Watson had command of a hushed House and a shocked Prime Minister