Donald Macintyre's Sketch: Nobody’s minding their Ps and Qs at PMQs

PMQs reverted to its usual guffawing self as Corbyn grilled Cameron over tax credits

The Labour leader speaking at PMQs on Wednesday (PA)

It’s odd how despite the serial attempts to change the tone of Prime Ministers’ Questions it invariably slides back to its normal mood music.

Corbyn shouldn’t pause, as he did on 4 November, because of chuntering, guffaws or groans from the other side, like a schoolmaster trying to glare his unruly pupils into guilty silence. As in the classroom, that simply isn’t going to happen. The only course is to plough on until the Speaker intervenes.

He was back on whether Cameron could promise no-one would be worse off because of tax credit cuts. “Last week I asked the Prime Minister the same question six times and he could not answer. He has now had a week to think about it.” Which Cameron had—thought about it, that is. Not to answer it, but to be a lot more polished in not doing so.

Cameron showed him the glint of his flick knife when Corbyn asked about the £2000 loss of income that the cuts would impose on a “serving soldier”. Since he had “said he could not see any use for UK forces anywhere….” the “serving soldier would not have a job if the honourable Gentleman ever got anywhere near power.”

But when Corbyn raised the NHS, Cameron went for full-on mockery, saying it was Labour that was facing a “winter crisis”, adding that “his media adviser is a Stalinist, his new policy adviser is a Trotskyist and his economic adviser is a communist. If he is trying to move the Labour party to the left, I would give him ‘full Marx’”. The pun was excruciating, but Corbyn seemed riled, as Cameron surely intended. “The issue I raised with the Prime Minister was the national health service—in case he had forgotten.”, he snapped a little too petulantly.

An irritated Cameron remarked to the Speaker as he left, that PMQ’s was getting “longer and longer.” But some of it had been pretty easy. Although the “planted question” is familiar, there is also the “ultra-safe” question. The MPs simply choose something the Prime Minister has already announced he will do, and ask him to announce it again.

So, on 4 November new Tory MP Mike Wood asked “Will the Prime Minister take action to speed up the adoption process…. ?“ This is what anyone who can remember schooldays Latin knows as a “nonne” question - one expecting, not to say absolutely guaranteeing, the answer “yes.”