PMQs sketch: Heightism lives on as Angela Rayner jibes at 'pint-sized loser' Rishi Sunak

Deputy PM Oliver Dowden hits back at ‘Right Honorable Landlady’ amid house sale controversy
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With the “pint-sized” Rishi Sunak talking big about defence in Berlin, Oliver Dowden filled in at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday with an unmissable target to aim at as he faced off against Labour’s Angela Rayner.

Sir Keir Starmer’s number two has been stalked for weeks by questions about her house sale.

The Deputy Prime Minister obliged by getting in a shot at the “Right Honorable Landlady”, and reflected that this was their fifth PMQs joust in the past 12 months.

“Anymore of these and she’ll be claiming it as her principal residence,” Mr Dowden said.

But Ms Rayner had pre-empted the line of attack by insisting to Mr Dowden that the country would rather know more about another property dispute: why some Conservative MPs are threatening to sabotage attempts to ban no-fault evictions in legislation currently under debate by Parliament.

“Now instead of obsessing over my house, when will he get a grip an show the same obsession with ending no-fault evictions?” she said.

The former trade union official who once railed at Tory “scum” had hard-to-miss targets of her own. There was Liz Truss’s quixotic book launch last week, and Mark Menzies MP quitting the Conservatives following the revelation of a baroque plot involving “bad people”.

Ms Rayner went on to muse about how Boris Johnson was felled by his own MPs, as she highlighted reports that Mr Dowden has been urging the PM to call a general election sooner than later.

“Has he finally realized that when he stabbed Boris Johnson in the back to get his mate into Number 10, he was ditching their biggest election winner for a pint-sized loser?” she said.

Other forms of prejudice are frowned upon, but heightism appears to be alive and well in the Commons.

Towering above the Commons, the clock in Big Ben was on the blink. Nearby, military horses were on the loose. It added to an air of slight unreality inside the chamber as the deputies staged their scripted duel.

It was left to the SNP’s deputy Westminster leader, Mhairi Black, to note a burning issue further afield after reports of mass graves being unearthed in Gaza by Palestinian officials following the withdrawal of Israeli forces from two hospitals.

“Two years ago when mass graves were discovered in Ukraine, this House united in condemnation and rightly treated these graves as evidence of war crimes, which Russia must be made to answer for,” she said. “These graves [in Gaza] also constitute as war crimes, don’t they?”

Mr Dowden rejected any comparison between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the democratically elected government of Israel, which he said could be trusted to investigate the matter.

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