HENRY DEEDES sees Boris Johnson in top form beating up the opposition

Armistice Day in the Commons, where Labor cannons in the PMQ fell eerily silent. No oikish teasing, no loud boos. Even the excitable Angela Rayner, unusually demure in a Kamala Harris-style pantsuit, changed her voice mode to silent.

Boris Johnson, on the other hand, was surprisingly cheerful. He brushed aside every question from Sir Keir Starmer with the casual confidence of a top-tier hitter playing for the tie. Gone is that tearful look from last week. Talk of a vaccine to the rescue had clearly made the prime minister smile.

Sir Keir’s attacks focused on the profligacy of the government. Say ah! Labor complaining about wasted cash is like Donald Trump complaining about sore losers. Many of us still cringe at the billions Gordon Brown squandered on that useless NHS computer system.

Boris Johnson, on the other hand, was surprisingly cheerful. He eliminated every one of Sir Keir Starmer’s questions with the casual confidence of a first-order hitter playing for the tie.

Vexing Starmer, in particular, was a £ 130 million bill for spinning doctors. Boris pointed out that these had been required by the vaccine working group to combat the guts that anti-vax nutters were producing. Public relations is, unfortunately, a necessary evil of public life. Like expensive lawyers. Let’s never hear former attorney Sir Keir complain about that, right?

Sir Keir’s tone grew more and more stately as he lectured the prime minister about not knowing the “cost of the pound in his pocket.” He accused Boris of treating public money as his own. I thought people tend to be more cautious when it comes to spending their own money, but hey.

As Starmer accumulated his list of charges, it was noticeable how every criticism he directed at Boris also made against Chancellor Rishi Sunak. How desperate the Opposition is to dull the glow of the golden boy’s glowing halo.

Sir Keir mentioned some of the government’s disastrous PPE deals. Some sounded like they were made inside the back of Del Boy’s three-wheeler. We learn that one company, Randox, was paid £ 150 million for a pile of unusable face masks.

Sir Keir’s tone grew more and more stately as he lectured the prime minister about not knowing the “cost of the pound in his pocket.” He accused Boris of treating public money as his own. I thought people tend to be more cautious about spending their own money, but hey

Yes, yes, said Boris, we’ve moved on ever since. He noted that the government had since purchased 32 billion items of PPE, none of which would have been possible without the private sector.

The prime minister was making his opponent look contrary to business. Sir Keir’s brow furrowed in puzzlement. He quickly turned to the licensing plan. He brought up a conversation he had this week with a photographer named Chris, whose industry has been decimated by the government’s inability to support the self-employed.

Boris advised Chris to continue following the government’s lockdown measures. It is not a great comfort to the eyeglass wearer who pays out of pocket. Couldn’t Hacked Off deliver our fighting snappers some of Max Mosley’s squillons?

With Sir Keir no questions asked, the prime minister launched a spiel prepared for news bulletins, urging the public to adhere to his ‘Hands, face, space’ mantra. With increased testing and a vaccine in the works, science had given us “two big boxing gloves to squash the virus,” he said, “neither of which was capable of delivering a knockout blow on its own.”

Sir Keir, who had failed to land his own knockout punch, sat there whimpering, as if Carrie had just dropped a sack of Boris’s unwashed little ones on his lap.

In other exchanges, Ian Blackford wrongly congratulated Joe Biden on winning the ‘North American elections’. The good people of Canada might have a thing or two to say about it.

As always, the man of the people Blackford spoke from his luxurious Mar-a-Lago on the Isle of Skye. I notice Sky News now subtitles him as ‘former senior executive of Deutsche Bank’. You will hate that.

Probably the only noteworthy moment of this tepid session was when Labor’s Angela Eagle (Wallasey) asked the prime minister about his ‘old friend’ Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the election result. Boris deliberately referred to Trump as the ‘previous president’.

Just as I was speaking, an email appeared in my inbox from the Trump campaign team requesting a donation of $ 5 to help get the election through the courts. It’s time for Trump’s daughter Ivanka to make an intervention, if she doesn’t call the men in white coats …