Tom Peck's Sketch: Labour's Eagle sinks her talons into George Osborne

The oratory may not have soared but though her target is no longer as fleshy as he once was, Angela Eagle found her mark

Shadow First Secretary of State Angela Eagle speaks during Prime Minister’s Questions (PA)

It is entirely in keeping with what remains of the Labour Party that, given a rare opportunity to show it might be more than a circus act, it should release the world’s most unflappable eagle: Angela Eagle.

Bizarrely, it worked. The oratory may not have soared but her talons were sharp and, though their target, George Osborne, is no longer as fleshy as he once was, they found their mark.

With the Prime Minister away on the next leg of his Brits Abroad tour of Europe, (this week it is Romania and Poland’s turn to have a chubby pale Brit fly in for a day and patiently explain why everything’s so much better at home), it was the turn of the understudies – Osborne for David Cameron and Eagle for Jeremy Corbyn.

She resembled not so much a bird of prey as one of Ted Hughes’s thrushes.

“No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states /No sighs or head-scratchings”, the poet once wrote, foreseeing by a full half century the day an ornithologically themed replacement would stand in for Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs. “Nothing but bounce and stab/And a ravening second.”

And, like the guests in the Hughes’s back garden, Ms Eagle did not find it difficult to “overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing”, in the form of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The usually silent Labour back benches roared their approval. She even had them cheering a quote from Tony Blair. “Just mouth the words ‘five more Tory years’ and you feel your senses and reason repulsed,” she said. That she had had to go back to a speech from 1996 to find something suitable didn’t dawn on anyone until later.

Her opponent had some acceptable lines of his own, and one unlikely advantage of possessing the full oratorical range of a wronged toddler is that it makes it harder to detect which jokes are pre-planned and which are spontaneous.

“Most opposition parties are trying to get momentum, they’re trying to get rid of it,” Osborne whined at one point. A niche gag, but when you remember that the Leader of the Opposition sat at home makes up 33 per cent of the television audience you can get away with it.

Fortunately, for Mr Corbyn, watching somewhere in his 1970s sports casuals, sandals and sad face, the television cameras didn’t quite convey the full din that greeted Ms Eagle’s introduction. But even he can’t fail to be aware that it is only his absence that gives his MPs anything to cheer about.

That the cameras almost never cut to faces in the crowd is also a relief for the usual range of Tories who brayed away as if they’re not in the middle of a bullying scandal that has left a young man dead. James Berry MP in particular growled and gurned like a man raised by wolves in an Austrian basement, rather than public school, Harvard and the Inns of Court.

It was a refreshing taste of the old kind of politics. Back to the new kind next week. Oh well.