Readers here will know that I have quite a lot of time for Mr Speaker, John Bercow, not because I agree with him about politics (I don’t) but because he has used his office to make Parliament important again. Again and again he has made senior Ministers go to the House of Commons and face (as they should) questioning from MPs about major live issues. This used to be very rare. Now it is pretty much universal, and even after Mr Bercow leaves, his successor, be he or she ever so toadying, will not easily be able to give the practice up.

That’s all very well. But the MPs themselves aren’t always up to the opportunity this gives. Ministers don’t always get the harsh grilling they deserve. Asking truly difficult questions is a great skill (I am fumbling towards knowing how to do it after many years of ministerial press conferences, and I still smart and wince over the opportunities I have muffed, especially over David Cameron’s expenses) . One sign that I may be getting there is the reluctance of some politicians to take questions from me at all, which I regard as a badge of some honour.

And even if you succeed, you can’t in any way rely on your colleagues and rivals (this is as true of journalists as it is of MPs) to notice your triumph, let alone follow it up.

But the problem is even more profound. Parliament and the political media now seem to lack any kind of true questioning spirit. In an astonishing article in ‘The Times’ which lies behind a paywall, it was revealed earlier this week that Dominic Cummings, a former aide and close adviser (he left official employment in January, but is still said to drop in from time to time) to Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, had let fly some wonderful, true and enjoyable attacks upon politicians and civil servants (and by implication on political journalists, who have by and large not noticed what Mr Cummings is pointing out, and obediently pump out the bland official line on everything, even the official rows that they are carefully briefed on, so as to give the illusion to them and others that they are ‘insiders’) .

Here is a selection . Of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, he said this person was a ‘classic third-rate suck-up-kick-down sycophant presiding over a shambolic court’: ‘MPs have no real knowledge of how to function other than via gimmick and briefings. That's also how No 10 works. It's how all of them are incentivised to operate. You get ahead by avoiding cock-ups and coming up with tactical wins, you don't get ahead by solving very hard problems.’

Then he spoke of '…politicians running around who don't really know what they're doing all day or what the purpose of their being in power is.'

My absolute favourite : 'Everyone thinks there's some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that's where the really good people are, but there is no door.'

There is no door! Those four words are almost literature.

Or my second favourite 'As Bismarck said about Napoleon III, Cameron is a sphinx without a riddle — he bumbles from one shambles to another without the slightest sense of purpose.'

'Everyone is trying to find the secret of David Cameron, but he is what he appears to be. He had a picture of Macmillan on his wall — that's all you need to know.'

Now, Mr Cummings’s long and close connections with Michael Gove are very well-known, though a sort of arm’s length arrangement has been reached in recent months. You might say that Mr Cummings was a deniable operation - ‘The Continuity Michael Gove’ or ‘The Real Michael Gove’. Or the ‘I can’t believe it’s Not Michael Gove’.

By the way, Mr Cummings later went on to describe the Conservative approach to the EU as ‘whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private, and overall hollow’, which is about as true a statement as I have heard in London on this subject in many a long year.

And he added: ‘As the black flags of Isis fly and Putin seeks to break Nato, William Hague poses for the cameras with Angelina [Jolie] and Cameron's closest two advisers stick with the only thing they know – a 10-day planning horizon (at best) of feeding the lobby (badly) and changing tack to fit the babbling commentariat (while blaming juniors for their own failings).’

I like that ‘babbling commentariat’ phrase myself.

Does Mr Gove think this? Or anything like it? It’s far from impossible to believe so.

So, when his former aide deliberately says these things on the record, it would be perfectly reasonable for everyone in Westminster to conclude that Michael Gove’s private mind is being opened unto us, or at least to speculate productively along those lines and see what Mr Gove says.

Indeed, I have to say that if any aide to a senior Shadow cabinet member in the Labour camp had said anything comparable, the entire mediasphere would have been full of raging speculation about a death-blow to Red Ed. Tory MPs would have been whipped out of their somnolence by Downing Street’s loyal thugs and bullies at Westminster, and made to bray and howl and heckle until it looked like a real crisis.

And, within hours of the Cummings outburst being published, there was a wonderful opportunity for Labour MPs to do this to the Tories. It is called ‘Education Questions’, and it fell due on Monday in the Commons, just after prayers at half past two of the clock.

You can look at it here

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmhansrd/cm140616/debtext/140616-0001.htm#14061610000005

Of course, there were the usual hors d’oeuvres to get through, as the Junior Ministers (and what a lot of them there are) did their bit.

But there was no main course.

The Cummings outburst, which must surely have been on everyone’s mind, repeatedly did not come up, until, to his great credit, the Labour MP for Cardiff West, Kevin Brennan, rose to his feet. This is what happened:

‘Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab): Can the Secretary of State confirm that the architect of the free schools policy, Dominic Cummings, was in the Department last week, despite the Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss) saying in a written parliamentary answer to me that there was no record of his visit? Could that be because he wrote last week, in typically bad taste, that he always signs into Government Departments, including No. 10, under the name of Osama bin Laden? What on earth is the Secretary of State doing still relying on this man’s advice?

Michael Gove: The architect of the free schools programme was actually Andrew Adonis, not Dominic Cummings, as he himself has said. Free schools were a Labour invention—a point that was repeated by the former Prime Minister Tony Blair when speaking to The Times today. As for the hon. Gentleman’s points about former special advisers, all sorts of people from time to time seek to visit the Department for Education to exchange ideas with old friends and colleagues.’

And with that (not particularly elegant) evasion, that was it. Nobody followed it up. The supposedly golden boy, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, Tristram Hunt, later wasted his opportunity on a weary and repeated question about the exhausted Birmingham schools controversy.

Labour’s Lisa Nandy made a bold late stab , thus : ‘Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab): Will the Secretary of State tell the House exactly when Dominic Cummings ceased to hold the pass that allowed him access to the Department for Education?’

Which would actually have been a rather good question, except that it was fatally too long. It needed one slight adjustment, to leave out the detailed stuff about the pass, and stick to asking when exactly Mr Cummings last spoke to Mr Gove, no matter where or how. For, as we see, the irrelevant technical detail always provides an escape for the skilled evasion merchant. As we now see:

‘Michael Gove: I think it was Jimmy Carter who was once attacked by critics for worrying about exactly who was using the tennis courts at the White House. I am not responsible for the allocation of passes to the Department for Education, but I am always happy to welcome constructive critics such as the hon. Lady for an enjoyable discussion over a cup of tea whenever she wants to come to the Department.’

Surely this was just a failure of preparation by Labour? So I actually turned down what would have been an enjoyable and educational broadcasting appearance at lunchtime today, so that I could watch, live, Prime Minister’s Questions. Silly me. I was (foolishly) sure that the Cummings revelations would play a large part in the events. My hopes rose when the first MP up to ask a question was Kevin Brennan, who had done so well on Monday.

Mr Cameron was vulnerable from many directions. Had Mr Cameron rebuked Mr Gove for the behaviour of his aide. Is he a sphinx without a riddle? Does he bumble from one scandal to another without the slightest sense of purpose? Is his chief of staff a sycophant?

Nothing. No hint that anyone had even read these devastating criticisms from a man who was for years smack in the middle of government and (as far as we know) is still welcome in Mr Gove’s private office and his private world.

But no, Mr Brennan asked about passports, last week's issue, and that, I think, was that. As so often during PMQs, my vital signs gradually shut down as it deteriorated from fake combat into a parade of sycophancy and camera-catching.

When is a scandal not a scandal? When it’s not in the interests of the establishment (which includes the media) for there to be one.

Baffling. But here’s an interesting thing. Listeners to my recent ‘What the Papers say’, will know that I am always fascinated by headlines that aren’t justified by the words beneath them (remember ‘Labour admits defeat’ from the Daily Telegraph after the local elections, when Labour hadn’t even been defeated, let alone admitted it?).



Now I draw your attention to this story in ‘The Guardian’ of Tuesday 17th June, under the headline ‘Gove forced to disown senior adviser after attack on Cameron’, and with the by-line of that veteran political reporter Patrick Wintour.

It is to be found here:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jun/16/michael-gove-dominic-cummings-david-cameron

The subject of the verb in the headline is ‘Michael Gove’. He’s in the story, and the opening paragraph repeats the headline.

‘The education secretary, Michael Gove, was forced to disown his most senior aide after his former special adviser described David Cameron as bumbling, the No 10 chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, as a sycophant presiding over a shambolic court, and the direct of communications, Craig Oliver, as clueless.’

Wow! Forced to disown it, was he? That sounds pretty rough. Who did it? Let’s have the details. But there are none. And let’s read the words in which he did the forced disowning. But there are no such words. Maybe the sub-editors cut them out. But it seems unlikely.

So, a) where and when did he ‘disown’ him, and at whose behest and b) where’s the description of this ‘forcing’ ? I agree it’s in the passive, but who did it and how? And where’s the evidence for it?

Why in any case should he have been forced to do anything of the kind after (as the Guardian story says):

Number 10 ‘brushed aside the attacks, saying Cameron was not interested in such stories.’

Oh, well, if he is 'not interested' in a close Cabinet colleague's aide publicly attacking his government as an aimless disaster populated by sycophants and vacuums, why shoudk anyone else be?

All I can find is this reference to ‘aides’:

‘The education secretary's current aides said Gove had not known about Cummings's planned attack on No 10 and did not agree with his views.’

And then ‘In the Commons, Gove sidestepped questions about whether Cummings had been in the Department for Education last week.’

So, if an unnamed ‘aide’ or even 'aides' (whom we can’t question and who can’t be made to take responsibility for what they have anonymously said) says Mr Gove didn’t know about it, that cancels out the fact that a named aide, closely associated with and recently employed by Mr Gove has publicly said all the things he’s said? Not really.

Interesting, isn’t it?

But there’s still no door. They’re just as bad as you always thought they were. And there’s no Norland nanny, holding their hands or cleaning up after them when they have had too much power, got over-excited, and been sick on the Downing Street floor. This is indeed the Children’s Hour.