Today Theresa May sounded as if she had lost, and Jeremy Corbyn looked like a winner

The Labour leader sounded as if he had won the election, while his MPs called her ‘the interim Prime Minister’ and asked ‘Why is she still here?’ But at the end of the day, we know May can stay until the Tories tell her to leave

Jeremy Corbyn still struggles to command the Commons (PA)

The debate on the Queen’s Speech is introduced, by tradition, by two backbench MPs who are supposed to give witty speeches. After the deaths in terrorist attacks and the Grenfell Tower fire, however, the contributions from Conservatives Richard Benyon and Kwasi Kwarteng were more sombre than usual.

But Kwarteng summed up the mood with his quizzical observation that nothing much had changed. “We have the Government,” he said. After Labour MPs laughed at him, and pointed to the DUP benches, he rephrased it: “We have a government. The Leader of the Opposition is in his place. All’s well with the world.”

When Jeremy Corbyn spoke, he sounded like a man who had won the election. “My party, Labour, won almost 13 million votes at the election, and that was because we offered hope and opportunity for all.”

And when the Prime Minister replied, she sounded like a loser. At least she was a fairly gracious one. She paid tribute to Corbyn’s work for his constituents after the Finsbury Park attack. She apologised to the nation for the failures that led to the Grenfell Tower fire. And she made one passing, rueful reference to her “testing” time.

But she also managed to congratulate Corbyn ironically: “He fought a spirited campaign and he came a good second.”

It was left to Labour backbenchers to make her humiliation count. Kevin Brennan asked a question referring to her as “the interim Prime Minister”, while Wes Streeting said: “Given that she asked for a personal mandate and didn’t get one, the only question is: why is she still here?”

Yet they were only able to ask their questions because she allowed them to intervene, a sort of masochism tactic that helped rally her own side. The Prime Minister was able to turn the low expectations of her to her advantage. After George Osborne called her a “dead woman walking”, and after we had seen her looking wooden and evasive in her Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis last week, simply turning up today and dealing with the cut and thrust of the Commons made her look like a leader.

And Corbyn, for all that he has the sweep of history behind him, is still a terrible Commons speaker. It is peculiar that someone who can rouse rallies and who has learned to deal with the toughest TV interviews still cannot deal with the rhetorical requirements of the nation’s foremost debating chamber.

He did the serious stuff well enough, demanding answers on Grenfell, and he even managed a joke or two. But he failed to make Conservative MPs feel as if they had lost the right to govern. He accused the Government of “deliberately making people worse off”: the sort of over-the-top demonisation that unites Tories around their leader.

He allowed Angus MacNeil, the Scottish National Party MP, to ask him a question about Labour’s position on the EU single market and customs union. “Um,” he began in response, saying Labour’s position was very clear. Which it isn’t.

And then he just lost his way, so much so that Jacob Rees-Mogg, the 19th-century Tory, mischievously asked the Speaker to rule on a point of order on the grounds that Corbyn had said “in conclusion” 10 minutes before.

By the time Corbyn said, “Labour is not merely an Opposition, we’re a government in waiting,” Conservative MPs laughed heartily and genuinely.

In the end, as Kwarteng observed, after the election, the Conservatives were still on the government side of the House and Labour were still on the other side. Theresa May has been humbled, but she is still Prime Minister and everyone knows she can go on being Prime Minister for as long as the Conservative Party wants her to.