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A selection of lines from parliamentary sketch-writers.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne was in front of the Public Administration Committee, answering questions on public spending.

that Mr Darling's right-hand minister was reluctant - to the point of appearing "queasy" - to mention the word "cuts":

"He sat there between two Treasury aides, small, very white, like a golf ball in a carpenter's vice. He was a maestro of mumbled waffle. Here was the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, the man we look to as the protector of our tax money, pooh-poohing the idea of cuts."

"He's got an attractive laugh, has Liam Byrne, but he used it too often, sounding like a desperate husband trying to make light of his infidelities."

on a Commons discussion in which Harriet Harman claimed that her Twitter account had been hacked into, suggests that Ms Harman does not come across as an avid tweeter:

"Harriet does not tweet so much as plod. It would be like communicating with treacle."

In the House of Lords, the ease with which peers' debates move from one subject to another which is totally unrelated to the Parliamentary business in hand:

"Whatever serious topic they are supposed to be discussing, they usually wander off down some side road. It's like chatting to a friend in a tearoom while waiting for the rain to stop: pleasant, agreeable, and you can chew over anything that pops into your head."

Similarly, the difference in the way that peers talk to each other compared to MPs down the corridor. He gives the example of Lord Mandelson's apology to former education secretary Lord Baker that he could not be present for a debate on university funding as he had "essential departmental business".

"Lord Mandelson knows peers know he is presenting them with a convenient fiction, which is why he makes the whole thing far more enjoyably preposterous by pretending that wild horses would not keep him away. Instead of getting cross with Lord Mandelson, we are grateful to him for amusing us."

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