Johnson and Starmer should know being rude isn't clever

There is no complete list of words that constitute an unparliamentary language in the House of Commons.

- JOHN RENTOUL

There is no complete list of words that constitute an unparliamentary language in the House of Commons. But it turns out that “dodgy” is definitely on it. Ed Miliband got away with it in 2015, when as leader of the opposition he called David Cameron “a dodgy prime minister surrounded by dodgy donors”. But Dennis Skinner, the Labour backbencher, was thrown out of the chamber the following year for calling Cameron “Dodgy Dave” over his personal finances.

That ruling seems to have stuck, and Zarah Sultana, another Labour backbencher, was asked yesterday by Eleanor Laing, the deputy speaker, to withdraw the word when she applied it to ministers. After protesting that she couldn’t think of another word, Sultana said she wouldn’t withdraw her remarks, but she avoided being expelled.

The UK parliament website lists nine examples of terms that MPs are not allowed to use to describe each other, which include “coward”, the word Keir Starmer used on Wednesday to describe Boris Johnson. The others are: blackguard, git, guttersnipe, hooligan, rat, swine, stool pigeon, and traitor. Some of those are so antique that they have not been used in the Commons this century, except for on occasions when MPs were quoting the rules about what they were and were not allowed to say.