Tom Peck's Sketch. Prime Minister's Questions, or Hitting a Dead Jellyfish with a Tennis Racket

That David Cameron called the refugees at Calais a "bunch of migrants" was no accident.

(BBC Parliament)

They’re all the bloody same aren’t they, trade unionists, the Argentines, the migrants at Calais, Google. They come over ‘ere, or very nearly over ‘ere, drive our tubes, grill our steak, sing our hymns, ruin our quiz nights. All the bloody same.

Yes, at Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron called the people suffering at Calais “a bunch of migrants” and lumped them in with the aforementioned groups for the purposes of yet another terrible joke. This you will be constantly told, makes him an appalling individual, and one who only around 75 per cent of the population agree with.

A slip of the tongue. So what? Except it wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was right there in his torturously pre-prepared material, tucked in the slot where the nails-down-a-blackboard pun-downs usually go. This little sneer slipped out with all the accidental spontaneity of the Queen’s Speech at the state opening of Parliament.

His point? That because Jeremy Corbyn has not, in recent weeks “stood up” to the trade unions, the Argentines or the ‘bunch of migrants’ he met in Calais, he would not therefore stand up to the might of Google, when it comes to demanding they pay their fair share of tax.

Once you’ve stopped applauding our brave Prime Minister, who has indeed stood up to the refugees living under tarpaulin behind an iron fence in France but not to the world’s largest company, living in a vast glass office in central London but who apparently have ‘no presence in the UK’, it’s worth spending at least a nanosecond considering what this argument - constructed at great length by his best advisors - is meant to mean.

That lifelong, unwavering Marxist Jeremy Corbyn’s sympathy towards the suffering of migrants at Calais is evidence that he would feel just as sorry for Google when it came to making them pay their tax.

Jeremy Corbyn will never be Prime Minister, so we can never be truly certain where his sympathies really lie - refugees or corporations, but if really had to guess?

The rest of Prime Minister’s Questions was its usual self, which if you’ve ever seen anyone hit a dead jellyfish with a tennis racket is not hard to imagine. And if you’ve not, it’s a fun thing to do on family holidays from Prestatyn to Phuket.

Corbyn carefully throws his questions up in the air, occasionally looking like they might sting. But then the Prime Minister takes a swing at them, and it doesn’t matter if the shot’s a good one, if it’s going in or out, because it obliterates entirely on impact.

“Is £130m a fair rate of tax for Google?” It doesn’t matter, because “It’s more than the last Labour government managed.” That Corbyn has fractionally more chance of inventing a carbon-neutral Delorean and going back in time and joining that last Labour government than he has of forming his own doesn’t matter either.

“I don’t know why they find it funny,” Corbyn briefly raged, as he always does at the wall of hilarity in front of him. “It’s not funny.”

Except it is, Jeremy. It’s hilarious. The Conservative Party, traditionally, has a bit of a thing for winning elections, and you’re the the funniest thing it’s ever seen in its life.