The *only* down side to the smoking ban in restaurants is that nowadays movie directors couldn’t possibly make a scene like Colin Farrell’s brilliant confrontation with a fellow diner in In Bruges…

Police Academy Seven Brides For Se7en Brothers

When you indexers meet up, do you all sit in alphabetical order?

(sorry, I'll get my coat...)

Nigel Farage was a racist bully at school but Rachel Reeves won the wrong chess championship so who can say who is worse?

Sure, but just as a definition can be a verb in the surface defining a noun, the cryptic grammar doesn't have to match the surface grammar. It only has to be sound internally - and I think it is in this case. YMMV

And it’s fine to use a freestanding participle in a cryptic clue - the clue doesn’t need to function as a grammatical sentence - which I think is more or less what @charliemethven.bsky.social was getting at…

Depends whether you read the solution as an adjective or a verb. I initially it thought it was fine, then @crypticblah.bsky.social convinced me it wasn’t, but now I’m leaning back towards it being fine as long as you read the solution as a verb…

This is clearly the house the Beatles had in mind when they wrote “She came in through the bathroom window”

Actually, no - “like X” can be adverbial, I don’t see a problem with that aspect of it

For example, you could define WADDLE as “walk like a duck”

I think that construction is still transitive, with the object being implicit.

That said, you make a good case for why the clue still works as written

No, the issue is that the solution is an adjective and the definition is a verb phrase…

If you read it as a verb, it’s transitive so needs an object

Try substituting the def in a sentence, eg:
The Chancellor is misleading the Commons
The Chancellor is behaving like Reeves the Commons

Of course, substitution is only one way of validating a def - there are others. And if it “sounds natural” to most solvers, maybe that’s good enough

I just had another think about it and can see that you are in fact entirely correct! Bit it’s a subtle one and most solvers won’t notice that - or care much even if they do. Good spot though

It’s not redundant - you need it to qualify “behaving”, which would be an insufficient definition on its own