Health questions. The Lib Dem benches were almost empty. No doubt their MPs were in Eastleigh, desperate to hold on to their slim poll lead, or else investigating Lord Rennard, or, for all I know, engaging in "inappropriate behaviour", which may include getting your wife to take your speeding points. What busy bees they are! They have far too much going on to waste time hanging round Westminster.
Unlike David Tredinnick, the Tory MP for Bosworth, who asked about "complementary medicine". Mr Tredinnick believes the NHS should spend more on, say, homeopathy, a view he shares with Prince Charles. The MP, like the heir to the throne, is treated as an amusing eccentric, but he isn't entirely harmless. Suppose he were to demand that instead of employing more nurses, the NHS should spend millions on consultants to design new logos for hospital trusts? Or instead of training doctors, public money should provide bonding sessions for senior administrators in St Lucia? He'd never hear the end of it. But when he wants money forked over for useless mumbo-jumbo, people listen calmly, as if he were describing his religion or his mother. It would be unseemly to challenge him.
Instead, the minister, Dr Daniel Poulter, said NHS treatment had to be "evidence-based", which means, I assume, "clear off, Tredinnick, and take your healing crystals with you".
This wasn't the only strange moment. Sir Peter Tapsell rose, or rather, arose. Normally at this stage a crack team of monks would arrive in the gallery to record Sir Peter's words and illuminate them for the edification of future generations. But his question was about worrying levels of mortality in Lincolnshire hospitals. It had nothing to do with Afghanistan, the louche behaviour of bankers, or the unwise sale of our gold reserves by Gordon Brown. No wonder everyone looked baffled. I envisaged the monks returning disappointed to their cells.
There would not have been much else to detain them. Labour's Andrew Gwynne had a rant about people kept waiting in A&E thanks to a "toxic mixture of cuts and reorganisation". The new health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who looks more than ever like the school nerd who's been mysteriously promoted to head boy, replied, whinily, that he expected "a more mature attitude" from a party that closed or downgraded 12 A&E departments while they were in office.
Do they ever wonder how this sort of thing must sound? Some old, sick person has been waiting outside A&E on a trolley for 20 hours, when along comes a minister to assure them that they've got nothing to complain about, Labour did a lot worse! Do they imagine that would be a consolation? Or would anyone be cheered by the endlessly repeated claim that the Labour administration in Wales has cut healthcare funding? You'd want to scream, "But I'm not in Wales, I'm here now, and I need a doctor to look at me!" But that wouldn't be playing the political game.
And at the moment Mr Hunt declared, "I have set the NHS the challenge of becoming completely paperless by 2018!", I wanted to bury my head and scream silently for 10 minutes.
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