QUENTIN LETTS: Starmer, the startled lavatory brush, was twitching

This column is brought to you from a deranged tunnel of noise.

My desk is by a window under Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower, formerly Clock Tower.

It overlooks Parliament Square, where masses of farm tractors are currently blowing their horns.

They are the sort of souped-up klaxons Latin Americans enjoy blowing at national-day parades.

Each hooter can strike several notes and some have been pre-set to Happy Birthday or La Cucaracha. Yes, the farmers are again protesting about inheritance tax.

They are making a vexatious tumult – but this, and the growl of their revved engines, is merely the start of it. 

Other vehicles are blowing horns in sympathy or in rage at the jam. That creates a secondary layer of pandemonium, as in The Italian Job when Turin becomes grid-locked. 

To this racket can be added police sirens as Plod tries to impose order.

In the occasional lull, that lunatic Stop Brexit man is up to his tricks with a ghetto blaster on the corner of Whitehall, playing his medley of tunes such as Ode To Joy.

 Such a moment occurred just now. 

The song he was playing at that time? The Sound Of Silence.

At which point Big Ben started to bong. Aieee! I feel like a dog on Guy Fawkes night.

 Politics eventually drives everyone mad.

Sir Keir Starmer may be heading that way. At PMQs the startled lavatory brush was again twitching. 

And v. batey. The twitch was above his right eyebrow and became evident when he was bawling at Kemi Badenoch. 

Television viewers may not see quite how cross she makes him.

Yesterday she focused on immigration, and Sir Keir and Labour MPs adopted scoffing expressions. They yelled mockery at Mrs Badenoch. More noise.

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Speaker Hoyle was possibly feeling as frazzled by the general din as the rest of us who work here. 

He turned sharply on one heckler, Graeme Downie (Lab, Dunfermline & Dollar). The witless Downie adopted an innocent expression but the Speaker was having none of it and told him, with rare asperity: ‘If you haven’t got the guts to stand up the comment, you shouldn’t be in here!’

Amid the customary hoopla Mrs Badenoch always stays calm and twinkly-eyed. Are her sallies demotic enough to satisfy Reform Party voters? Not yet. But, boy, Sir Keir resents her attacks.

Yesterday she suggested, with nice superiority, that he was indecisive, inept and uninterested in promoting the national interest. 

She noted that he once dismissed ‘all immigration law’ as having ‘a racist undercurrent’ and that he made Shamima Begum’s lawyer the Attorney General.

That last point drew a deep ‘ooh’ from the House. It was the sound the corrida makes when a matador’s pica has entered the bull.

Sir Keir went loopy. ‘I was director of public prosecutions for five years!’ he yelled. ‘I dedicated five years of my life to law enforcement!’ 

The sense of enraged entitlement was palpable. He felt we should be grateful for his public service.

It so happens that immediately before that outburst I was watching Sir Keir’s right fist, down by his outer thigh. 

Wrapped round a ballpoint pen, it was clenching and unclenching, hitting the bench in anger, while Sir Keir licked at his dry lips. There is a nervous petulance there, you know.

Then to the Lords where they were debating the eviction of hereditary peers.

Lord Dobbs (Con) said the hereditaries were being ‘guillotined’. The 3rd Lord Mancroft (Con) gave a speech of restrained, boiling, patrician anger, deploring how ‘nasty, vindictive and destructive’ Labour had become. 

The debonair hankie in Lord Mancroft’s top pocket looked as if it had exploded. Lord Falconer (Lab) could have burned a hole through the Tory with the frenzy of his gaze.

And at the back of the chamber the life peer Lord Saatchi (Con) crossed his legs, betraying two bare feet encased in suede loafers. 

No socks. His left ankle was a peculiar tinge. Blue bloods are doomed, but Lord Saatchi’s strangely blue ankle will remain.