Brown's Got Plenty of Sole

The prime minister was back, paying one of his fleeting visits to the UK, and it was shoe-throwing time! What a great form of protest that is. The point is made crisply but no one is seriously hurt. Election meetings will be so much more fun as the trainers, pumps, plimsolls and slingbacks fly through the air.

Apparently, in Iraq, where George Bush came under a hail of footwear, the two greatest insults are to call someone a dog and to throw a shoe at them. So Ken Clarke will be able to fling Hush Puppies at the present chancellor, and how satisfying that will be!

Gordon Brown described his visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan, then produced a crazed version of the EU summit, in which, among other things, it was decided that the Irish should be made to vote again on the Lisbon treaty. He then went on to claim - you could bottle the man's cheek, spread it on your ham and call it mango chutzpah - that the rest of Europe was following Britain's example of a fiscal stimulus.

"The debate about the use of fiscal policy is now resolved," he announced, to loud and happy Tory jeering.

Time for David Cameron to hurl a tasseled loafer. "An unelected prime minister wants the Irish people to vote twice because he didn't like the result the first time, and he refuses to let the British people vote once because he knows he wouldn't like that result!"

The pound was crashing through the floor and the German finance minister had called his actions "crass".

The shoe flew past the prime ministerial ear. The Tories would do nothing for homeowners or small businesses. They were still the nasty party. At this point, Theresa May, who first called her own party "nasty", could have chucked a leopardskin kitten-heel number from Russell & Bromley, but she stayed shod.

It was Nick Clegg's turn. The pound, he said, would soon be worth less than a euro, and Britain was about to become once again the sick man of Europe. Wheee! as a Lib Dem sandal whizzed across the chamber.

Then the mighty frame of Sir Peter Tapsell manifested itself. Even the Wussians (Sir Peter has a slight speech impediment) had failed to hold Afghanistan with 300,000 men. The Taliban had no interest in terrorism outside their own country. We should get out.

I felt that Sir Peter had taken a superlative handmade shoe from Lobb's of St James, crafted on his personal last, and - aptly enough - lobbed it straight at the prime minister. David Heathcoat-Amory asked, with faux innocence, why it was that, though the Irish had supposedly made a mistake in their referendum, we in Britain were not going to have a general election - even though we too had clearly made a mistake. Thungkk! - a sturdy Oxford brogue just skidded off the dispatch box.