Oh dear. Today's papers carry gleeful accounts – including one from our own Simon Hoggart – of Tory minister Simon Burns getting cross with John Bercow, the Speaker, to the point of calling him a "stupid, sanctimonious little dwarf", or words to that effect.
This is neither kind nor wise. Careers do not prosper as a result. It suggests a lack of control.
And the diminutive Bercow, the target of much Tory criticism and private loathing, is beyond their reach now. He was re-elected by the new house after 6 May with barely a ripple of the widely-predicted revolt. We knew he would be, didn't we?
Burns, on the other hand, is 57 and was a junior health minister (1996-97) under John Major. He has always struck me as an affable enough man, but is lucky to have got a job in Andrew Lansley's team this time when the Wrinkly Police are having older people put down everywhere. He must know it.
Yet Simon's account, confirmed by other sketchwriters such as Ann Treneman and Quentin Letts, describes how Burns was gently ticked off by the Speaker during yesterday's health question time because he answered a Tory question by turning round to face the government benches.
"May I gently ask the minister to face the house?" Bercow said, according to Hansard's version here, adding: "I am sure that opposition members will want to see his face."
"We do, Mr Speaker, very much, we want to see him squirm," Andy Burnham, the next questioner and shadow health secretary, confirmed.
I was not present for this exchange (I was having a quick zzz in the library at the time), but some witnesses suggest that the "face" reference was a niggle. Burns is no Adonis, though neither is Bercow.
There again, the original question had been about NHS waiting times – targets Lansley has just canned, unwisely in my view. It is a subject of passion on both sides, and the Tory Burns had turned to address was Stephen Dorrell, a big cheese.
Dorrell was his old boss as health secretary and is now his new monitor as the chair of the Commons health select committee, whose members are set to include such colourful Tories as David Tredinnick, the alternative medicine buff, and Nadine Dorries, scourge of science.
Some time later, a similar exchange took place. You can read Hansard's version here – but you will not find the offending words, only clues.
As with cabinet minutes – and official accounts of sensitive events where you work, too, I expect – Hansard staff sometimes clean up the language as well as the grammar.
Here is the key bit:
Mr Speaker: Order. I have just had members complaining that they cannot hear. The minister must face the house. It is a very simple point; I have made it to others and they have understood it.
The next we hear from Burns is:
Mr Burns: I am a bit confused as to where to look. [Interruption.] Right, I will look forward.
And apart from a complaint from Ian Paisley Jr about ministers trying to "berate, scoff, scold and hiss" when the chair is doing its job, that was it. Bercow wisely backed off making a big deal of it. Apparently, Burns used to be Bercow's whip – his probation officer – in the long years of opposition. That must have been trying for both of them. There is bad blood there.
Bercow may not feel so relaxed in private. Certainly his wife, Sally, by no means a shrinking wallflower, later tweeted the incident – as Hoggart reports. "Mr B is Speaker, so get over it," she concluded.
Quite so. And Mrs B is a shrewd as well as glamorous operator, I suspect. I watched her chatting with a Labour ex-minister yesterday and she was impressively attentive.
Does any of this matter when the government is hacking away at public spending, much of it sensible but sweeping away a lot of jobs in the process, and the global financial system is still tottering on the edge of crisis? Bad things – as well as good ones – happen all the time, as Jonathan Freedland reminds his readers today.
No, it's not very important. But it is a reminder that the new politics is more like the old politics than high-minded observers would like us to believe. It's hot, people get cross and petty, they settle scores.
The bottom line is whether or not Bercow is doing a good job trying to modernise attitudes and procedures in the House of Commons. My impression is yes. He keeps order well, though I can see that he annoys old Tory colleagues. Even some Labour MPs – the ones who first elected him as a reformer – call him Squeaker.
That's only part of the job, running this huge, creaking institution under pressure. I recently attended an event in Speaker's House where he supervised the giving of the Speaker Abbott (he was the one who allowed the press its own space in 1804) award to a Somalian journalist whose courage made our own worries sound very petty.
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