It was enough to put you off your Turkey Twizzlers. Readers of a sensitive nature may want to stop now, for what follows is red in tooth and claw — or, more accurately, in beak and wattle. I know that the idea was to spread reassurance. I am afraid it just made me queasy. Bootiful, it was not.

David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, began by telling us that the farm in question had held 159,000 turkeys which were housed in 22 sheds. The bird flu deaths had been in one shed containing 7,000 birds. Later, a Lib Dem referred to this as “factory farming”, and Mr Miliband looked askance at this and snapped: “Your words, not mine.”

The wonderfully named Labour MP Bob Blizzard asked how many deaths had taken place in this particular shed. Mr Miliband must have known the answer but he doesn’t like to pass up an opportunity to be clever. Thus he noted that on Tuesday last week one per cent of the shed population had died, on Wednesday the figure was 3.6 per cent and on Thursday 16 per cent. This seemed an awful lot of dead turkeys to me.

Mr Miliband, who prides himself in being superfluous as well as elliptical, added: “It was the leap to 16 per cent which led the local vets to notify the State Veterinary Service.” I couldn’t help but note that 1,120 dead turkeys had died in one shed in one day but that this was not, obviously, factory farming.

Mr Miliband then gave us a grisly lesson in how to kill a turkey, Defra-style. First, gas them. Then put them in “sealed, leak-proof lorries” and trundle them all to Staffordshire for rendering. This involves the “crushing and grinding of carcasses”. I won’t go on, though Mr Miliband did.

The “ick” factor was now very high. I couldn’t figure out why Mr Miliband was being quite so grisly. He is quite theatrical: I suspect he is going to end up either as Prime Minister or in panto. But perhaps he was giving us way too much information because he had way too little information? For at the centre of his statement was a mystery: how did the turkeys get bird flu? There were dark hints of Eastern Europe. But Mr Miliband, dramatically, rejected “the Hungarian connection”.

MPs always tread a line at such times between not wanting to alarm anyone and wanting to alarm everyone. Quite a few yesterday expressed worries about the lorries, noting that in the past animal parts, blood and “fast-flowing liquid” had dribbled on to roadsides. Mr Miliband rejected this.

An MP then asked what seemed a simple question. Wouldn’t the lorries’ tarpaulin covers flap around in a wind? Mr Miliband insisted tied down”. He boasted about the type of knot used and even offered to put a picture of it in the library. I must admit that when he had said that the lorries were sealed, I had thought he had meant sealed, in the same way that a tin is sealed. I had not envisaged lorries with tarps held down by whizzy knots.

There was then a terrible outbreak of “chicken and egg” jokes. Mr Miliband received a lot of advice from Tories who used to hold his job. He wondered what the collective noun for them was. “A flock!” cried someone.

A Tory then shouted that this particular flock had been culled in 1997. “But culled in a very humane way!” burbled Mr Miliband. Even the jokes made me feel queasy.

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