With Theresa May rubbing shoulders with the King of Spain, it was left to cabinet office minister Damian Green and shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry to front up Prime Minister’s Questions this week.
And the Labour frontbencher brought her own particular brand of sass to proceedings while quizzing her opponent on Brexit.
“You’re supposed to be building consensus, man,” she told Green, in possibly the first ever use of such a turn of phrase in the House of Commons.
The Islington MP went on to accuse the Tories of keeping a “no deal option on the table” over Brexit, turning her fire on the rest of the cabinet.
“I do appreciate all the First Secretary’s answers, but they do just serve to illustrate what a mess the government has got itself into by threatening to walk away even before talks began.
“Isn’t the truth now that we’ve got a no deal option on the table, but they won’t tell us what that means, they’ve got contingency plans, but they won’t let the public see them.
“We’ve got a chancellor demanding transitional arrangement which a no deal option makes impossible. We’ve got foreign secretary making it up as he’s going along. We’ve got a Brexit secretary so used to overruling his colleagues that he’s started overruling himself.
“And we’ve got a Prime Minister who’s so bereft of ideas that she’s started putting suggestion boxes around Parliament.”
Despite Thornberry slightly fluffing one of her killer lines: “I know he is new to this but the way it works is he asks...I ask the questions and he answers them,” many people seemed to enjoy the change of pace...
It's not too difficult to see why the shadow foreign secretary is swiftly becoming the number one choice to deputise for Jeremy Corbyn at the despatch box.