Hello, welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm joined today by Tim Shipman

and Isabel Hardman. Now, it's Wednesday, which means PMQs. Tim, what happened?

What happened is that the Prime Minister is in China, so we were treated to Deputy Prime Minister's

questions. Mr David Lammy stepped forward to the dispatch box once more

facing off against Andrew Griffith, the shadow business secretary, and we were expecting, I don't know

what we're expecting. Griffith is a smart chap, a bit of a Tory attack dog. We thought this might be

a bit of a mawling of poor old hapless Lammy, who was pretty disastrous the last time he did this. And it is my solemn duty to inform the Great British public that Lammy rather wiped the floor with him. Griffith didn't really get his focus. He went on sort of economic stuff. You have the choice when you're doing this of sort of taking the Mickey out of David Lammy or treating him as a proxy for Starma. And I think Griffith probably made a mistake of treating him as a proxy for Starma and prosecuting

an economic argument. And Lammy, you know, may or may not know a great deal about that, but he had

some above average jokes in response, talking about the transfer window, football analogies,

Tories defecting to reform, all that sort of thing. Lammy, I mean, confident enough as he was, sort of said, you won't be doing this again to Griffith. And I think quite a lot of the MPs would have agreed with that. I mean, I don't know what you think is about, but he sort of was a bit more poised. He gambled a lot last time, Lammy, and got himself in a right old mess and got angry. And this time he seemed to be very consciously speaking very slowly and being a bit more statesman-like. And as I say, someone had written him some OK gags and he sort of escaped in one piece.

Yeah, I mean, I think both David Lammy and Andrew Griffith had prepared for the

last session of DPMQs at which David Lammy had, as Shippers says, imploded, basically. And so

Lammy was being very careful. Griffith, Griffith had clearly turned up thinking, this is going to be

an absolute bloodbath and I'm going to have a lot of fun.

But it ended up being, I mean, it was a bit like we'd sort of got stuck in the departmental questions session that precedes Prime Minister's questions because it was just sort of, maybe that's unfair to the departmental question session.

It was very low rent.

And Griffith was, you know, he was,

he was trying to prosecute a case on business rates and on Labour's attitude to businesses

generally. And actually it was quite difficult to argue with the points he was making. It's just that

he made them so badly that Lamy could just sort of bulldoze his way through the answers by saying,

we're doing this, you know, the kind of the classic easy way in which you deal with poor questions, which is just to list things that the government says it's doing. And if you have a good question, they can say, well, you say you're doing that, but actually this many businesses have gone out of business and, you know, this many people are unemployed. And actually you say you're doing this, but you haven't even implemented it.

But, you know, there was no agility from Griffith on that.

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