IT takes something dreadful or something wonderful to unite the House of Commons. Yesterday, alas, it was something dreadful: the murder of Sarah Everard. True, bickering bubbled under the surface and occasionally spouted forth, but at least it was about how best to address crimes against women and girls.

Sarah’s murder had to be a turning point, said Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, agreed: “He is right, frankly. Unless and until we have a change in our culture that acknowledges and understands that women currently feel that they are not being heard, we will not fix this problem.” He added that “all politicians” had to work together on this.

Sir Keir agreed they had to “collectively rise to this moment” and called for a new law on street harassment and a tougher approach to stalking. To which the PM said he’d happily look at any proposals and was indeed already ahead with “tough measures” against stalkers and to make the streets safer.

Then came the first sign of discord as Boris claimed the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (England and Wales), debated the previous evening, included measures to protect women and girls through tougher sentences for assailants. “It would have been good in a cross-party way,” he said, “to have had the support of the opposition.”

Sir Keir claimed the proposed bill “said a lot more about protecting statues than it did about protecting women”. And, as a former Director of Public Prosecutions, he added chippily: “I really don’t need lectures about how to enforce the criminal law.” Alluding to three appalling sex crimes where each assailant had received sentences under 10 years (the punishment people assaulting statues could get under the new bill), he called for tougher sentences.

Retorted the PM sarcastically: “Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if there was a bill going through the House of Commons which did exactly that?” He said Labour’s three-line whip against the bill had been “crazy”.

Sir Keir rowed back from the bickering, saying “Let me return to the constructive spirit”, in which vein he pointed out gently that the bill’s priorities were wrong.

Mr Johnson said he was “grateful to him for the collegiate way he is addressing this and for the way he is reaching out across the chamber”, but added that he should still have supported the bill.

And so they agreed to disagree about the best way to proceed. Proceedings then abruptly moved to Cornwall, where the PM agreed with local MP Steve Double that it was a great place to visit and maybe even, as requested, build a new gigafactory. Cornwall, he averred, is “the Klondike of lithium”.

Scotland, meanwhile, is the Klondike of nukes. Following the UK Government’s plans to increase its stockpile, just to be the sure the world would be thoroughly destroyed, SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford castigated Boris for pouring “billions into a nuclear arsenal that sits redundant on the Clyde”.

Not that he was calling on the PM to use it. He was calling for a government like Scotland’s Holyrood administration that “prioritises bairns not bombs”.

Mr Johnson, positively relishing this Jockland knockabout stuff, averred that “what the people of Scotland need and deserve” is a Holyrood administration that tackles education, crime and drug abuse. They wanted a government that “weans itself off its addiction to constitutional change and constitutional argument,” said the leading Brexit campaigner.

Mr Blackford complained that the PM never answered questions put by Scottish MPs, and there is truth in this allegation. They can ask about child poverty, nuclear weapons or the environment, but all Boris bangs on about is Scottish independence. The man is obsessed with it.

When Mr Blackford asked precisely when the Scottish people had given him the moral or democratic authority to impose weapons of mass destruction on Scottish soil, Boris retorted with some flummery about “the Scottish people contributing enormously to the health, happiness and wellbeing of this entire country”.

He added that nukes provide jobs. Readers, the older you get, the more you recognise that the word “jobs” almost always accompanies something ghastly.

Speaking of which, out of the blue shortly afterwards, Sir Bernard Jenkin (Con, Harwich and Essex) fumed that the Nats’ disdain for the “Integrated Review” of defence, security and foreign policy, “a bold British vision for our role in the world”, showed that “they hate the UK more than they want jobs for their own people”.

Phew. Harsh words. And Boris agreed with them, laughing that it was “hard to know what motivates our friends in the Scottish National Party”.

Yeah, tricky one. Is it nostalgia for Empire? A proud land standing on its own two feet, well away from that Europe? A country keeping just the 195 nuclear weapons rather than feeling a need for 260? Who knows? Perhaps, in a collegiate spirit, Boris, with his hotline to “what the people of Scotland need and deserve”, will tell us next week.

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