Huhne spoke with the tone of a Russian Imperial princeling

Westminster's week got off to  a magnificent  start with Chris Huhne’s arrival home. The former Cabinet minister was plainly delighted to find such a large throng of photographers perched on his doorstep. No Norma Desmond, he! 

And so it was, with his sleek hairdo and face even more Huhnishly photogenic after  a couple of short months’  porridge, with his petite popsy on his arm, with an assortment of politician hand gestures and rolling-news-friendly tilts of the head, that he addressed the lens monkeys.

He spoke with the poise, the tone of a senior princeling of  the Russian Imperial family  stepping off the train from St Petersburg. Prison, he said, had been ‘humbling’.

Photographers surrounded Huhne as he was taken away by car at around 7am and driven to his London home after two months away

The Huhnster ‘humbled’? We’ll be the judge of that. After such a masterpiece of self-absorption, the penultimate day of the Queen’s Speech debate in the Commons was going to struggle.

And yet the contest between Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and his opposite number Andy Burnham had its moments.

Mr Hunt, whose speech opened the debate, did not talk long. When he suddenly sat down after a quarter of an hour, the House was uncertain.

Was he taking an intervention from that insistent mosquito Chris Bryant (Lab, Rhondda)? Or had he finished his oration?

He had spoken a bit about the Government’s desire to cap the sums people can be forced to pay for their care costs. It was all done in a controlled, managerial manner. Labour do not find him easy because there is so little to grab hold of – it’s like trying to tackle a greased harpoon.

The contest between Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt (left) and his opposite number Andy Burnham (right) had its moments

Mr Hunt’s political character is understated. Nothing is shouted. Alistair Darling always understood the value of dullness and so does Mr Hunt. He did something quite brutally political, though. He blamed Mr Burnham for certain hospital scandals in the Labour years, including that in Staffordshire. Ouch.

When the report into that scandal was published a few weeks ago, David Cameron did the big-tent bountiful thing of saying no personal blame should be attached to any Labour minister. That position has plainly since melted.

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Sometime Health Secretary Burnham was wounded by Mr Hunt’s attack and when he tried to complain, Mr Hunt pressed the lance further into the wound.

Then Mr Hunt resumed his seat. As a waiter will sometimes hesitate before taking away a plateful of food at which a diner has only nibbled, so Speaker Bercow. The Squeaker rose to his full tuppence ha’penny and stalled. Er, was the minister taking an intervention? Was he taking a rest? Or had he finished?

It took a few seconds for Mr Hunt to transmit his intention: that he had completed his tour of the Department’s responsibilities, as touched upon by the Queen’s Speech. A parson who kept sermons that short might soon find him or herself promoted to cathedral dean.

‘Is tha’ i’?’ asked Mr Burnham, abjuring glottals in this Age of Miliband.

Lack of substance was met by lack of substance. Mr Burnham proceeded to give a speech of which, I suspect, this not undecent and thoughtful man may in future years feel ashamed.

After a couple of opening sentences about the ‘battered and bruised’ NHS, he went into a feeble spiel about how the Conservatives were ‘dancing to UKIP’s tune’. The relevance of this to health policies was, at best, tangential.

Mr Burnham also accused Tories of ‘reading out what Mr Crosby gives them’. This was a reference to Lynton Crosby, a Tory election campaign planner whom Labour MPs fear because he is unsporting enough to think that politicians should address the voters’ concerns and do so in a language they might actually understand. Time and again we were to hear Mr Crosby’s name from Mr Burnham.

When Tory backbenchers asked Mr Burnham, okay, what he would do on Europe, Mr Burnham recoiled in mock shock.

‘They haven’t got anything to say about health,’ he cried. ‘Instead they’re banging on about Europe!’ That was in fact what he had  just done.