Poor Rishi Sunak: even the weather is against him. The snow across south-east England ensured that a week which already looked like an obstacle course on the trains now added planes and automobiles to its victims. As we looked out of the window and accepted that we were going to be working from home, our smart meters showed our boilers doing overtime to keep us from freezing.

All these difficulties gave the House of Commons the look of a school where only a few of the pupils have made it through the snow, their damp socks and welly boots drying on radiators across the building. We await detail on whether those MPs stuck in their constituencies were building snowmen and tobogganing down hills.

Streeting famously has the smoothest cheeks in Parliament

For the Conservative MPs, at least, it would definitely have been more fun than sitting in the chamber. Wes Streeting had been granted an Urgent Question on the nurses’ strike. The Labour health spokesman is walking a complicated line, saying the country can’t afford to give nurses what they want, but also attacking the government for not meeting union leaders to discuss the matter. It’s hard to escape the thought that it’s easier to criticise on these issues than it is to solve them.

But that’s politics. Being in government means dealing with intractable problems. Being in opposition means trying to hang as many of those problems round the government’s neck as you can.

Streeting famously has the smoothest cheeks in Parliament, so perfectly shaved that Gillette should name a product line after him. It’s been noted before that he would need very little make-up to play Buzz Lightyear. If he needed a stunt double, though, he could do worse than the Conservative health spokesman, Will Quince.

We last noticed Quince two prime ministers ago, when he was defending Boris Johnson on the morning radio shows by reading out a line from a piece of paper that he’d been handed by Downing Street. We could hear him realising, in real time, exactly how little the assurances he was giving us were worth. We could also, if we listened very closely, hear every other government minister resolving that they weren’t going to put themselves through what Quince was enduring. Johnson resigned four days later.

Every day that takes Quince further from that morning is a good one for him. Compared to that, explaining why you won’t talk to nurses about pay is a cakewalk. He’d come, he told MPs, in place of the Health Secretary, Steve Barclay, who was at that very moment in a “COBRA meeting” to discuss the strikes.

More in sorrow than in anger

It sounded so glamorous! “Convene COBRA!” We thought of Tom Cruise and Kiefer Sutherland staring at huge screens as numbers scrolled past, shouting things like: “Dammit, Rishi, we have only 23 minutes to save this hip operation!” Oliver Dowden, shirt unbuttoned, chain-smoking as he tries to hack into the Royal College of Nursing’s mainframe and change the numbers voting for the strike. In reality, a “COBR meeting” — the government doesn’t actually use the “A”, which makes me think it should be pronounced “cobber” in a jolly Australian accent — is simply, well, a meeting. In a room in the Cabinet Office.

Streeting wanted to know why Barclay wouldn’t have the kind of meeting that would lead to the strike being suspended — one to discuss nurses’ pay. “They can’t even be bothered to try to negotiate to prevent strikes going ahead,” he said.

Quince responded that Streeting was doing the bidding of his “union paymasters”. The government was simply unable to do anything about money, he explained, because the matter had been settled by “an independent pay body”. He tried to make it sound like this had involved tablets of stone brought down from a mountain.

This was certainly the view of the few Tory backbenchers who had made it to the chamber. Richard Drax rose, more in sorrow than in anger: “It is regrettable, I find, and I think most people do, that the opposition benches continue to use the NHS as a political football”. This is presumably a position that he’s reached since 2016, when he wrote on his website that Brexit would allow more money to be spent on the NHS.

Lee Anderson meanwhile accused Labour of “playing politics” with the strike. For a politician, Anderson is oddly hostile to politics. Last year he was complaining about England’s footballers being against racism. Now he doesn’t want the opposition to talk about the health service.

“I and the secretary of state refuse to play politics with this issue,” Quince replied, piously. Or indeed to do any kind of politics at all, which is why the strike will go ahead.

But this is precisely the problem. The health service, inflation, tax, government borrowing — all these are political matters, whether ministers like it or not. They’re going to have to start doing some politics, and quickly, or the weather will be the least of their problems