Kit Malthouse MP [UK PARLT (cc-by-3.0)]

AS MPs tiptoe around their words on Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, the deaths of children and an avoidable starvation, you might have expected that one found warning foreign secretary David Lammy that he could end up in The Hague to be a hard left firebrand.

But no, one of the starkest contributions we’ve heard in the House of Commons since the war began came from Conservative MP Kit Malthouse. Around here we know him better as the former deputy leader of Westminster City Council. Remember? He opposed the introduction of the congestion charge among other things.

“I’m just beyond words really at his inaction and, frankly, complicity by inaction at what is going on,” Mr Malthouse told Mr Lammy on Monday.

“He himself said there’s a massive prison camp being constructed in the south of Gaza.

“He knows that leading genocide scholars from across the world now are ringing the alarm bells… can he not see that his inaction – and frankly, cowardice – is making this country irrelevant?

“Can he also not see the personal risk to him, given our international obligations, that he may end up at The Hague because of his inaction?”

Mr Malthouse then looked around the chamber – it wasn’t that busy as usual – and said: “Finally, an appeal to the Labour backbenches: We can’t get your leadership to change their minds, only you can if you organise and insist on change.”

In interviews this week Mr Lammy has been critical and gone as far as saying that the UK government has asked Israel to “think again”.

At one point in the Commons, he said: “Me raising my voice will not bring this war to an end.”

This was about as energetic as he got in a week when the Daily Express, a title so often derided for seeming to care for little more than weather and Princess Diana, published a front page photograph of an emaciated child with the headline: “For pity’s sake stop this now”, adding the situation in Gaza “shames us all”.

To find a Tory MP and a right-wing newspaper being so strident perhaps suggests a changing tenor.

Mr Malthouse, who was a councillor in Westminster for eight years, has faced the familiar pushback that if you want Israel to change course, you somehow do not care about the victims of the October 7 atrocity and the hostages still held by Hamas, nor appreciate the fear of a repeat.

It should be needless to say how possible it is to feel for all of the victims of this horrifying period of history and still want more from the government.