The Sketch: Gordon stays in the bunker to avoid doorstep disaster

Will Labour get Crewed? They deserve to, don't you think? An aristocrat of the political class, with her own entry in Burke's Landed Gentry, parachutes in to claim her mother's seat by running an anti-elitism campaign against a local Tory with 80 foster siblings.

It's a disaster on the doorstep. So when voters seek clarity they look to Westminster, naturally, the centre of our political life. And what did they see on PMQs yesterday? Our Prime Minister in action. Terrifying sight. His moral compass is now spinning so hard it's producing a helicopter effect. He's all over the place. Wild and whirling he is, running out of fuel. He's stolen so many Tory policies he can't attack them without inflicting flesh wounds on himself. When he says Tories are the party of "tax cuts for the rich" we spend the rest of his answer with thoughts beginning, "But hang on, didn't you...?"

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Cameron asked him if the £2.7bn tax reduction was for this year only. This produced an answer aggressive and defensive but with no content. "We want to continue to help," he said. Cameron quoted the Chancellor on Newsnight, "one year only. I've made that clear". Gordon did his grinning thing, shaking his head as if to say, "You just don't understand do you?" But this is the attitude that got him into this mess.

It was desperate stuff. His authority evaporates day by day. In the chamber, at one point no one was listening to him. Hoon frowned, Alan Johnson wearily wiped his face, Ruth Kelly was lost in a dream. He walked straight into it when Cameron asked him why he wasn't going to Crewe. It was a "tradition" that PMs didn'tdo by-elections. Then Cameron read out Tony Blair's vigorous repudiation of the "convention" and compared Blair's desire "to lead from the front" with Brown's bunkering.

And what was the answer to that? The PM rummaged in his bag of replies and pulled one out. Cameron "never addresses issues of substance". But when Brooks Newmark asked him about the trebling of domestic violence cases in a year and the halving of convictions he produced the most insubstantial reply of the day: a) It was all the result of improved advice services and b) the Tory ought to "renounce his membership of the No Turning Back Group".

Is that really how Labour is going to fight back, and re-launch and lay out its vision?

PS: And who is Alky Ada? Gordon has got it in for her. And what's Osama bin Laden doing with my old drunken auntie?

simoncarr@sketch.sc

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