Today's PMQs proved that Corbyn would be just as useless as Theresa May at saving the NHS

Today’s exchanges were the usual pointless trading of statistics, insults and irrelevancies, while the health service goes from bad to worse

The NHS is in crisis and Government and Opposition are talking past each other. Jeremy Corbyn laid out the charges against the Prime Minister with some well-chosen examples. He said the numbers of patients waiting in ambulances for more than half an hour at A&E departments had gone up from 12,000 before Christmas to 17,000 in the last week of December.

He quoted Vicki, whose 82-year-old mother had “spent 13 hours on a trolley in a corridor, on top of the three hours between her first calling 999 and arriving at hospital”. He even engaged in a personal attack on Jeremy Hunt, pointing out that Theresa May wanted to sack him two days ago.

The Prime Minister responded with a wall of rival statistics and a willingness to apologise to patients whose operations had been cancelled during what is definitely not a crisis but a period of “winter pressure”.

At this point, both sides could have agreed that the NHS needs more money and could have had a debate about how to win public support for the tax rises needed.

But no. Theresa May went for Wales, where the Labour administration’s NHS record is worse than England’s. Whereas Corbyn opted for “funds are being siphoned off into private companies”, where they were “feathering the nests of private shareholders”. As if that is the problem.

My hero was Andrew Murrison, the Conservative MP who politely disagreed with the Prime Minister’s claim that the NHS is the “No 1 health system in the world”. He pointed out that on many indicators, the NHS has a worse record than countries such as Poland. He called for a royal commission to try to reach a national consensus about the way forward for the health service.

Now, royal commissions are a bad idea: they just gum up the policy-making works for ages. But Murrison performed a valuable service by opening up a view of the wide expanse of open space in the centre ground of British politics, currently unoccupied.

The answer to the problems of the NHS lies in centrism. It was New Labour that saved the NHS, came close to abolishing waiting lists altogether and ended up with the highest patient satisfaction rates. It was a legacy that was frittered away by the Conservative-led governments since.

Instead of trying to get back to the formula of higher funding plus reform, the front benches in the Commons are locked in a sterile debate between Tories who want to keep spending in check – even if it is rising just slightly faster than inflation – and tub-thumping Labour which blames the crisis on “creeping privatisation”.

I know this is a subject on which Corbyn’s supposedly left-wing rhetoric is popular, but it is one on which public opinion is wrong. Private providers are not the problem in the NHS; they could be an important part of the solution.

The tragedy of Prime Minister’s Questions is that there are row upon row of MPs on both sides of the House, but especially among the extinct Blairite volcanoes on the Labour side, who knew that what matters is who can provide the best service, free, at the point of need, not whether it is private or public.

Yet both sides, with the honourable exception of Andrew Murrison, sit there watching the pointless show, pointlessly.