Despite Prime Minister’s Questions ordinarily being the focus of British people’s attention every week, there was a feeling yesterday that all the excitement (work with me on this) was taking place elsewhere, notably at Rishi Sunak’s budget announcement and Nicola Sturgeon’s appearance before Holyrood’s harassment committee.

Indeed, the focus at PMQs was also elsewhere, Yemen to be precise, the subject of questions by both Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford.

Sir Keir wanted the PM to follow US president Joe Biden’s lead and suspend the sale of arms that could be used in Yemen. To make matters worse, he added, the Government had this week decided to halve aid to the Arab country.

Boris Johnson stuck to protocol and figures: the UK followed international guidance and had given almost a £1 billion to Yemen in the last five years. “And yes,” he added, “it is true that that current straitened circumstances, that I am sure the people of this country understand, mean that temporarily we must reduce aid spending.”

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Good stuff: clearly, the Yemenis were doing their bit in paying for our Covid budget. Sir Keir said it wasn’t a great advert for “global Britain”. But Boris stuck to his guns, as it were: “Given the difficulties that this country faces, I think the people of this country will think that we have got our priorities right.”

More irritably, he criticised Sir Keir for failing to address the “issues of the hour” thrown up, so to say, by the pandemic. “Instead, he’s concecrated his questions entirely to the interests of the people of Yemen.” 

The people of Scotland came up next when anglocentric Scottish MP Liam Fox (Con, North Somerset) asked that, “given the turmoil in Scottish politics”, and the fact that there’s no separate civil service in Scotland, would the PM confirm that mandarins pressurised to behave inappropriately “would have a mechanism to seek redress beyond the ministers to whom they are immediately answerable”.

Most MPs had no idea what he was talking about. Neither did the PM, who replied with some waffle about now being the time for civil servants “to focus on working together, to build back together, er, build back better together, rather than on measures that might divide our country.” Sly Mr Fox had been too cryptic. He’d switched on a light and it had all gone dark.

The aforementioned Mr Blackford, live in the lion’s den rather than remote on his sheep croft, shone the spotlight back on Yemen, accusing the Tories of “shamefully” backing the Saudi regime. But he got the same retort as Sir Keir about all the money already spent on Yemen and the vast sums now being spent supporting UK businesses and communities.

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It was during the subsequent budget debate that a particularly animated Mr Blackford took hold of matters by the short and curlies when he referred to “the bollocks that they’ve made of Brexit”. At first, I couldn’t believe my a***. Sorry, ears.

Bollocks, as you know, is a word of German origin referring to testicles. The Lib Dems used it in their anti-Brexit slogan. But surely it was unparliamentary language? Lib Dem Alex Cole-Hamilton has used it (in the singular or Hitler sense: “bollock naked”) in the Scottish Parliament. And, as it turns out, the SNP’s Deirdre Brock used it, again in relation to Brexit, not so long ago.

On that occasion, deputy speaker Eleanor Laing said she hadn’t intervened because the expression hadn’t been directed at anyone personally. All the same, I say! And say what you like about Mr Blackford: he’s got balls.