PMQs review: Jeremy Corbyn allowed Theresa May off the hook today

‘We are the Government and he is the opposition.’ In plodland, this counts as repartee

Jeremy Corbyn is a plodder. I say this not as an insult but as an observation on his style. If you support his politics, he is a long-distance runner. If you don’t, he is tedious. On Wednesday he decided to ask five questions in the form of demands for more public spending in next week’s Budget, and then to devote his sixth question to complaining about “the super-rich” a lot.

Theresa May is also a plodder, although on Wednesday she was like a plodding student who had done her homework and taken a strong caffeine pill before her exam. So she knew what the answers were to all Corbyn’s questions.

He wanted more money for the police. She said crime has gone down. He wanted fire sprinklers in tower blocks. She quoted Labour councils, including Corbyn’s own, saying they might not be effective. He said Universal Credit was driving up rent arrears. She quoted statistics saying the opposite. He wanted more spending on the health service. She quoted Simon Stevens, the NHS chief executive, saying that outcomes were dramatically better than three, five or 10 years ago.

Then, while he was asking for more money for schools, Corbyn unthinkingly referred to the benches facing him as “the opposition”. Conservative MPs thought this was funny – there hadn’t been many laughs so far – but he just said “yes, we are the opposition and they are the opposition to us – it’s not complicated”.

The plodding Prime Minister perked up all of a sudden. “He’s got something right,” she exclaimed. “We are the Government and he is the opposition.” In plodland, this counts as repartee. Tory MPs were delighted, and cheered happily. Labour MPs, reminded that theirs were the opposition benches, which were not even full, looked bored more than anything else.

When Corbyn stood up for his last question, a peroration about a super-rich few who dodge their taxes, it was so formulaic that hardly anyone could bring themselves to care. May cared enough to dismiss it briskly with her pre-cooked statbite from two weeks ago about the Government raising £160bn from action against tax avoidance and evasion since 2010. This must be rubbish, but it is good enough for the purpose of saying all governments of either party are always trying to outdodge the dodgers.

And she ended with a terrible slogan: “He may have given momentum to his party but he would bring stagnation to the country.” Goodness, it was bad. The more you think about it the worse it gets. In effect she was accepting that Corbyn is making progress, but just has a couple of reservations about Labour policy.

But it had the structure of the winning put-down – “ask not what your country can do for you” – and the sort of cadence that guarantees a round of applause from a BBC Question Time audience. So it drew loud cheers from the parliamentary Question Time audience. On the “opposition to the opposition” side of the House anyway.