I spotted John Prescott in the chamber yesterday with the joy of a twitcher who has just caught sight of a species who used to be common but is now rarely seen.
Indeed, I believe that the Lesser Understood Prescott has become something of a tweety bird himself. For a moment I thought that he was tweeting live from the chamber until I saw that he was not texting but holding a pen and scribbling away with an expression of deep concentration.
Mr Prescott wrote and wrote. Was it a question? Or a short story? (Or, indeed both?) The occasion was the energy statement by Ed Miliband who, in the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, is virtually unavoidable.
He even looks a bit like the omnipresent magpie with that dash of white in his coal-black hair that his brother, David, also has.
Mr Prescott’s face contorted with effort as Ed twittered, talking so fast and so nerdily that he could have been presenting a school science project. At any moment I expected Ed to whip out a model of a volcano made of papier-mâch? with sparklers for lava. Sadly, this never happened. Instead, he told us about something called the Low Carbon Energy Challenge, which sounded a bit like the Pepsi Challenge but with gigawatts.
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Mr Miliband is a star who could end up as a Labour leader. His shadow, Greg Clark, is also a star and, as such, could not just say that he agreed with everything that had been said. Instead, he announced: “What we have heard, softly spoken, was a declaration of a national emergency for our energy security!”
Well, I suppose if you represent Tunbridge Wells then you have to be Disgusted and so Mr Clark was duly very disgusted indeed. Labour was like an ostrich that had stuck its head in the sand rather than facing up to “our energy black hole!”. (Can you have a black hole in the sand? Does that make sense?) Eventually, he demanded that Ed apologise “to the British people”. There were a few snorts at this.
Mr Miliband accused Disgusted of being both alarmist and complacent. At this Disgusted looked even more disgusted (Mr Clark has a selection of “D of TW” facial expressions that range from 1 to 10: he was now on about 7.) Ed ranted on about how he may be losing 18 gigawatts but he is gaining 20. He ended by accusing Mr Clark of being unfit for government.
It was a relief when the Lesser Understood Prescott arose to ask his short story question and, as the words flowed effortlessly around the room, it seemed fitting to discover that he was talking about wind.
“Is he well aware we are doing well on unsure, oh offshore investment but not so well on unsure investments where a great deal more will have to be done,” said Mr Prescott.
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Unsure investments? Hmmm. This sounded interesting. As he twittered on, I knew that he must be talking about onshore investments but, actually, I think unsure is better.
Certainly, as everyone in Britain hates having a giant windmill flower rotating away like mad in their back garden, it is all most unsure. I have to say that, yesterday, Mr Prescott was the easiest to understand, by far. It was a tweet to see him.