Political column – March 9

That's a 10 second guide to Jeremy Hunt's Budget this week, in case you missed it.

You may have seen various "how the Budget affects me" tables, charts, graphs, and so on, but the people wondering most how the Budget affects them are Tory MPs. Will it help save their seats? We know the probable answer to that one, but Jeremy Hunt did at least have a neat dirty political trick by nicking Labour's plan to abolish the non-dom regime, which means Labour now has a black hole in its own budget calculations.

The other big Parliamentary news of the week was the arrival of the politician formerly known as Gorgeous George, although these days he is not considered to be gorgeous but positively dangerous.

George Galloway's election in Rochdale, a faraway place previously famous for being the haunt of Lisa Stansfield, has seen a circling of the wagons in Westminster.

It was an event elevated by Rishi Sunak to the status of a national crisis requiring a Churchillian speech at the lectern outside 10 Downing Street which had the tone of a call for calm in a country on the brink of dissolving into civil war.

Rishi called for people to come together and celebrate the diversity of modern Britain. It was both a plea for unity and a plea to respect our differences.

As the occasion was the election of Mr Galloway, what he seemed to be saying was that the voters of Rochdale must have been misled, or actually mad, to have elected him.

It can't have helped that the Conservative candidate reportedly went on holiday during the campaign and that Labour effectively gave up on the seat.

If the Prime Minister really has been converted to the ideal of national togetherness the logical thing for him to do is to form an old-fashioned government of national unity, inviting on board Sir Keir and the Lib Dems to serve in a coalition, putting an end to the current adversarial political atmosphere in which politicians of different parties disagree with each other on principle and call each other names.

Don't hold your breath.

The House of Commons used to be able to cope with characters from the awkward squad on the green benches, ranging from the likes of Andrew Faulds, who was prone to theatrical explosion, and Willie Hamilton, who wanted to defund the royal family, to Jeremy Corbyn in his backbench days and even Boris Johnson, a political outsider whose membership of the Westminster club evoked feelings, even among his own MPs, that club standards had slipped unacceptably and he should be thrown out, which in due course happened.

And while the safety of MPs is obviously paramount, in a properly functioning democracy that should not extend to MPs being protected from exposure to the reasoned views of ordinary voters, however swivel-eyed they may seem to the political classes.

Social media has added a new dimension to the nastiness and worry, but from a historical perspective today's MPs are not uniquely under threat as a previous generation operated in an atmosphere of constant fear for the 30 years of The Troubles, during which four MPs were murdered.

When Margaret Thatcher escaped assassination in the Brighton bombing the IRA statement was chilling: "Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."

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Being of the Airfix generation, and therefore probably permanently affected by protracted exposure to the fumes of polystyrene cement, I peered curiously through the shop window of Shifnal Models the other day.

I used to have Airfix aeroplane models hanging from my bedroom ceiling. Typically their paintwork would have my fingerprints in it, because I was never patient enough to let it fully dry before assembling the kit.

Sadly all was dark inside the shop, and a big pileup of mail by the door told its story.

In recent years Shifnal has seen lots of new development, and the centre was busy – with traffic.

It did make me think. So many more houses, but where were all the people?