David Cameron has handbagged the EU, but was less successful in explaining the whereabouts of his missing deputy
It was David Cameron's toughest test to date, explaining to the Commons why he had gone far, far further than any previous prime minister in handbagging the European Union. He made the Iron Lady look like a whimpering toady.
I was reminded of Lord Cardigan returning from the charge of the Light Brigade, explaining to the remaining troops how he had given those Russkies a lesson they wouldn't forget in a hurry.
But first we had to answer the question, where was Clegg? Or as a Labour member chortled at the start of the session: "Où est Nick?"
Was he at a nativity play starring one of his own children as Joseph or as half a camel? Everyone would have gone "Ahhhh!" Perhaps he was on the high seas with a van full of undrinkable yuletide Muscadet (two euros a bottle in Calais). Or, more likely, skulking in his office. In the Crimea, he would have been shot for cowardice. Cameron replied, lamely and to jeers, that he was not responsible for his deputy's whereabouts.
Cameron, as ever when he's in a hole, insisted that he had displayed courage and resolve. "It was not an easy thing to do, but it was the right thing to do," the prime minister claimed.
Ed Miliband was, for once, trenchant and effective. It was a diplomatic disaster. In future, the prime minister would learn what was happening to us from the pages of the Financial Times.
He summoned up reserves of scorn which, like shale gas, we hadn't realised were there, pointing out that a veto was what you used to stop something happening. It wasn't a veto if the very thing you want to stop went ahead anyway – "it's called losing!"
Perhaps he made a mistake when he invoked the name of Lord Heseltine, to mocking laughter from the Tories. They don't like Hezza, whom they see as the maniac Europhile who destroyed Margaret Thatcher. "You don't protect the City by floating off into mid-Atlantic."
Nicholas Soames, who had turned a deep and lustrous carmine colour, was booming at the Labour leader and had to be shut up by the Speaker. Miliband almost waved him down: "I'm not finished with him yet!"
Cameron, thus scorned, had few answers, except, in effect: "What would you do, chum?"
Miliband did not offer a reply, though I'll give him one, for free: he would not have got into this position in the first place.
(If you were thundering towards the Russian guns, would you have retreated? No, I wouldn't have started thundering.)
The crazed Tory headbangers were out in force. But they were preceded by Sir Peter Tapsell, the grandest headbanger of them all. Imagine a giant equestrian statue of Ozzy Osbourne. No time for the Hansard reporters to pick up their chisels. Sir Peter had nothing but admiration and "full-hearted support" for what David Cameron had done.
He added: "Without the long delayed and massive support from the ECB and the Bundesbank, the euro is doomed". To make sure we had got this, he said again, "Doomed!" and the Labour benches repeated the word over and over, so they sounded like a field full of pessimistic cows.
David Miliband, the missing, hologram leader, pointed out that we had never lost an EU vote on financial regulation. Cameron – always ratty when rattled – called him naive.
Then we heard from the people who are running the country now: John Redwood, Bill Cash, Patrick Jenkin, Andrew Rosindell, Mark Pritchard, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who wears three piece pyjamas and a bow tie in bed.
In Somerset all weekend, he told the house, "the toast was 'the pilot who weathered the storm!'" One of those toasts we doubt was ever toasted.
Philip Davies called the Liberal Democrats "lickspittle Euro-fanatics". Some of these guys now see the end of the coalition and our exit from the EU. They're pouring the petrol and can't wait to toss in the Swan Vesta.
The Lib Dems themselves were curiously quiet, possibly because their leader – wherever he was – had inserted the odd line into Cameron's statement, about the urgent need to stay in the EU and so forth.
Only Jo Swinson, their youngest member, said that at least we hadn't "headed for the exit" at the climate talks in Durban.
Lord Cardigan – sorry, Cameron – again praised his own courage. "We were right to charge, and the Light Brigade stands ready to do it all over again."