Theresa Mae West flashed her eyes at a Tory comedian: QUENTIN LETTS on yesterday in Parliament

Published: 00:45 GMT, 17 November 2016 | Updated: 00:56 GMT, 17 November 2016

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A risque joke from Theresa May. At Prime Minister’s Questions, long-serving Richard Bacon (Con, S Norfolk) put in a quirky plea for promotion.

Given the welcome advances for women and ethnic minorities in our society, he said, what reassurement could the PM offer ‘fat, middle-aged, white men who may feel that we have been left behind’?

The House laughed, for the engagingly salty Bacon is indeed on the porky side, middle-aged, white and has so far been over-looked for ministerial office.

Mrs May flashed her eyes and gave a little lick of her lips before growling, ‘perhaps he’d like to come up and see me sometime’. Theresa Mae West!

A risque joke from Theresa May. At Prime Minister’s Questions, long-serving Richard Bacon (Con, S Norfolk) put in a quirky plea for promotion. Mrs May flashed her eyes and gave a little lick of her lips before growling, ‘perhaps he’d like to come up and see me sometime’. Theresa Mae West!

More from Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail...

With Jeremy Corbyn and others trying to elicit details of Mrs May’s Brexit negotiating position – which doughtily she will not divulge – PMQs was less than fully informative.

Mrs May’s discretion is understandable but in the absence of Government news on this front, moaners and naysayers have the field to themselves.

We saw this earlier in the day at the first meeting of the new Brexit select committee.

A durbar of doom-mongering. Three Establishment boobies sat in a row, wringing hands about how terribly, terribly difficult Brexit would be.

These witnesses were: Sir Simon Fraser, former top civil servant at the Foreign Office and once ‘Chef de Cabinet’ to Peter Mandelson when he was a European Commissioner; Hannah White, a policy wonk from Blairite talking shop, the Institute for Government (it sounds official but is mainly funded by a Sainsbury family trust); academic Catherine Barnard, who holds the Jean Monnet Chair of EU Law at Cambridge University.

If Jean Monnet chairs are funded by the European Union, I did not hear that disclosed yesterday. Prof Barnard is a member of New Europeans, a lobbying group which ‘champions freedom of movement in Europe’.

Brexit would be ‘a huge burden, a huge additional load, a very considerable challenge’ for Whitehall, wailed Sir Simon.

Ooh yes, chimed the other two, it was going to be ‘complicated, vast, a gargantuan exercise, complex’ etc. Prof Barnard, very much a supporter of the System, insisted that we still had a ‘Rolls-Royce’ bureaucracy in which lots of terribly busy people were doing lots of ‘very good work’ but, my oh my, it was going to be a devil of a job, yes, yes.

‘It’s like a piece of knitting,’ said the EU’s Prof Barnard. ‘If you tweak one bit, the rest comes unravelled.’

Air was sucked through teeth. Heads were shaken with regret as they pondered the prognosis. The same thing happens when I take my second-hand Renault to the garage for its MOT.

‘We will need more civil servants,’ said Sir Simon, trying to disguise his delight at the prospect. Outsiders could be recruited from the private sector but if you did that you would have to pay the career civil servants more in order to maintain their morale. ‘Fairness of remuneration’ was terribly important, announced Sir Simon.

With Jeremy Corbyn and others trying to elicit details of Mrs May’s Brexit negotiating position – which doughtily she will not divulge – PMQs was less than fully informative

We heard how Britain only has perhaps 40 trained trade negotiators while the EU has hundreds. Why? Because while we were in the EU we were not allowed to conduct trade negotiations for ourselves! Prof Barnard speculated that the exiting process might last as much as ten years.

‘There is no quick-fix solution,’ she said with firmness. ‘Huge practical problems…vulnerable groups…regulatory standards…procedures.’

For shop steward Sir Simon, one of the most important considerations would be civil servants’ pension rights. And yet, he swore, he was not trying to be pessimistic. Perish the thought.

Prof Barnard, utterly serious, said that when she talked to students in Europe she encountered ‘perplexity’ that any country should wish to leave Paradise. These students rushed up to her, eyes presumably gleaming, to tell her ‘I love the EU!’

We can only suppose they are all trainee lawyers seeking a fat-salaried career in Brussels.

As an early 20th century French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, put it: ‘There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function.’