In the week of Shakespeare’s birth, I said at Business Questions that even the great dramatist couldn’t write a farce like we have seen from the government recently.
This week the culture secretary was forced to explain himself to the House following the revelations about the relationship between his office and News Corporation.
Despite telling the House on 3 March that he had published all the exchanges between his department and News Corporation, the emails disclosed at the Leveson inquiry demonstrate that the culture secretary did not!
As I said in the chamber, far from acting in a quasi-judicial capacity the culture secretary has been acting like a dodgy football ref who not only favours one team but is in the dressing room with them planning the tactics.
I pushed the leader of the House to confirm whether the prime minister has indicated his intention to come to the House to correct the record he placed in the library on his meetings with Rupert Murdoch.
The prime minister recalled just two. But as Chris Bryant said on Wednesday, Mr Murdoch revealed to the Leveson inquiry that he had met the prime minister more often than that.
The prime minister apparently ‘forgets’ the majority of his meetings with Rupert Murdoch. The prime minister also said he had not been involved in ‘any of the discussions’ about News International’s bid for BSkyB. But it now emerges he did discuss it with James Murdoch – over a cosy Christmas dinner with Rebekah Brooks while the phonehacking scandal was in full swing.
We know this prime minister doesn’t do detail. But his lapses of memory are beginning to look just a little bit too convenient.
Meanwhile the long parliamentary session is crawling to a close. It began with extravagant boasts by the chancellor of the Exchequer.
In June 2010 presenting his first budget the chancellor told the House that by today the economy would have grown by 4.3 per cent. He also told the House that unemployment would peak in 2010 and then fall in each subsequent year. He told us too that public sector borrowing would fall each year.
I asked in the chamber if the chancellor would be correcting the record.
The economy is back in recession. He has presided over the worst economic performance for a century. Unemployment is higher than when the government came to power. And they are borrowing £150bn more than they planned.
This is a double-dip recession made in Downing Street.
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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