This week at the Leveson inquiry we learnt further details about how the deputy mayor for policing in London put pressure on the Metropolitan Police to drop their investigation into phone hacking.
The Met say they had to remind him that the police are operationally independent of politicians and that operational decisions are taken by police officers, not the mayor’s political appointees.
I said in the chamber that it is especially worrying when it is a Conservative deputy mayor pressurising the police on an investigation that involved one of the prime minister’s senior aides, Andy Coulson.
I asked the leader of the House arrange for the home secretary to make an urgent statement about how such inappropriate interference by the mayor’s political staff can be stopped.
Meanwhile, despite the Liberal Democrat spring conference voting against the health bill at the weekend, Liberal Democrat MPs this week voted for it. I said it is becoming ever clearer that the deputy prime minister only takes his orders from the prime minister.
Given the prime minister’s love for horse-riding with old schoolfriends, I used Business Questions on Thursday to suggest some horses that the government benches might want to back at this week’s Cheltenham Festival.
As the prime minister is conveniently out of the country when unemployment reaches yet another high, one horse he could would be the appropriately named back American Spin.
With the health secretary’s career in terminal decline after his disastrous mismanagement of the NHS, his horse is clearly Final Approach
The education secretary, who is doing everything he can to undermine the Leveson inquiry, will no doubt want to put his money on Time for Rupert.
And the only possible horse for the deputy prime minister is running today in the 2.05: Palace Jester.
Finally as the budget nears, I asked the leader of the House to clear up a number of issues of concern.
I asked him to tell us if it fair that the government’s child benefit proposal mean a household where one parent works and earns £43,000 a year will lose child benefit while a household where both parents work and take home £84,000 won’t?
I also asked the leader if the House if the government is in favour of a mansion tax or not.
The business secretary thinks it is a good idea. The local government secretary thinks it is a terrible idea.
Conservative backbenchers want a tax cut for the top one per cent.
Meanwhile Liberal Democrat, cabinet ministers and backbenchers, wander around claiming that while the Tories only favour tax cuts for the rich, they don’t.
The truth is, as I said in the chamber, that every member of the government, at every opportunity have voted for budgets that take the most money from those that have the least.
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Angela Eagle is MP for Wallsey, shadow leader of the Commons and writes the weekly Business of Parliament column for Progress