The increasingly personal bickering between Cameron and Miliband went on today for most of the session. After a bad tempered set of formal exchanges—with Miliband branding Cameron ‘the dunce of Downing Street’ and Cameron calling Miliband and Balls ‘muppets’—the two front benches continued to trade barbs as backbenchers asked their questions. At one point, Cameron even accused Miliband of laughing at the failings of the Welsh NHS.
Miliband went on the sale of Royal Mail and the fact that the share price has shot up since the government sold it off. Miliband wasn’t quite clear whether he wanted to mock Cameron and the government for getting the valuation wrong or whether he wanted to call it something more sinister, ‘mates rates for his friends in the City.’ Cameron tripped up in his response, though, when he suggested that the Labour manifesto committed it to the privatisation of the Royal Mail. It did not.
One other thing that was striking was how disciplined the questions from the Tory benches were. All the questions from there were friendly and most of them were set up to let Cameron take a pop at Labour. It does seem that, for the moment at least, Tory discipline has returned.
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