The Sketch: We're sated with the old scandals

Wot, no new scandal? We don't like surprises like that. We're creatures of habit. We were expecting news that the Labour Party's overdraft had been paid off by some headline-worthy donor. Osama bin Laden, perhaps, to keep up with the scale of things.

But not only no new scandal the old ones don't seem to take any more. Harriet Harman fails to register a 40,000 injection into her campaign and her defence is no more than, "Whoops, I've done it again!" And no one's interested. We must be sated. Like sleepy lions. Tempting gazelles tiptoe past us but we just roll on our backs.

Cameron played a new parliamentary game with the PM by asking every question on a different subject. Flip him on the forehead, then poke him in the ear, then round the back for some dark work behind. It was to confuse him. But he just stood there and took it.

Q: Why has Labour's internal inquiry into the dodgy donations been partly suspended? A: It has not been suspended.

Tony Blair's first instinct when contradicted was to say: "Where I agree with you is..." and this often gave him time to think. But Gordon's first instinct is to say, "No, you're wrong" and this produces a sort of panic. He has to say "no" to stay in charge.

So Cameron read out the minutes of Labour's NEC meeting that showed the investigation was indeed partly on hold. They hate that, by the way. I used to publish Angela Eagle's account of the parliamentary committee meetings and she used to squeal like a power-saw at something she called "an invasion of privacy". That Cameron had got hold of these minutes must been a source of more grief to Labour than what they contained.

But the PM panics and says these quick things. It didn't matter very much in this instance, but it's worth noting that under pressure he might say something that isn't true just because he has to say something in contradiction. The trouble is, he doesn't think things through. He does things for effect.

Vince Cable, brilliantly, didn't make a joke. It wrong-footed the PM who used his prepared line anyway. Cable called in the Financial Times, The Economist and Treasury civil servants in support of his proposal temporarily to nationalise Northern Rock... and the PM said he was "better at the jokes than the economics". It's as feeble as "the failed economy we inherited from the Conservatives". But that wasn't spontaneous. Incredibly, he'd prepared that earlier.

simoncarr@sketch.sc

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