It started like a bit of good old political knockabout. PMQs opened with a planted question from Mark Menzies (Con, Fylde) asking the PM about Britain’s sick-note culture. Cameron, looking suitably grave, declared that the fake-sniffle problem afflicts even senior management.
Ed Miliband, he told us, had recently claimed he was too ill to attend a rally called by health workers. Three hours later he was seen heartily cheering at a football match having been driven to the ground in a Rolls Royce. ‘What was it,’ asked Cameron, ‘that first attracted the Labour leader to the multimillionaire owner of Hull football club?’
This prompted howls and jeers from every part of the house. Ed Miliband ignored them. He was in no mood for a fight and he wanted to preserve every scrap of energy for his Budget response. So he assumed his favourite funereal expression, which spreads upwards from his dark suit and covers his entire face, and managed to silence the house with his air of dogged solemnity.
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