PMQs: MPs scrutinise Labour instead of the government

David Cameron didn’t have a particularly good PMQs today. He struggled to make sense at some points, ending up telling the House that ‘two out of three people who want to become a nurse can’t become a nurse because of the bursary system’ and rambling about ‘two out of three Vickys’ being turned away from nursing courses, which left everyone wondering what the stats were for people not called Vicky.

The Prime Minister’s assertion about the bursary system costing so much that fewer nurses overall go into training may well be true, in the same way that saying ‘affordable housing quotas make housing less affordable’ can be true in policy terms. But if you are going to make a statement that sounds like you’re saying ‘the problem with gravity is it makes it very difficult for people to keep their feet on the ground’, you need to be able to offer a reasonable explanation for why you think that. Cameron didn’t.

But it didn’t really matter: Jeremy Corbyn struggled to follow up the questions on student maintenance grants and nursing bursaries effectively, and he had absolutely no back-up from the Labour MPs sitting behind him. So Cameron got away with it, on an issue about which one of his own MPs, nurse Maria Caulfield, has expressed concern. Once he had finished his exchanges with the Labour leader, Cameron then enjoyed an almost uninterrupted 20 minutes of supportive questions from Conservative MPs who were helping him to ridicule Labour’s many policy messes. A number of questions on Trident cropped up, including a terrible Beatles pun from Karl McCartney about yellow submarines.

In keeping with all the question times that we’ve had in the Commons this week, it felt as though MPs had decided that it was time to hold Labour’s feet to the fire, not the government that it is a backbencher’s constitutional job to scrutinise. Even MPs from other parties joined in, with Nigel Dodds asking for assurances that the Falkland Islanders would maintain their right to self-determination, following on from Corbyn’s comments on this at the weekend.

The SNP’s Angus Robertson was the exception, valiantly asking a question about what the UK government is doing to encourage peace in Yemen, which he followed with an excellent skewer on the Saudi air force using British arms in air strikes in Yemen. His were the only questions that all MPs bothered to listen to. And the only other question that bordered on difficult for the Prime Minister was from Tory John Baron, who complained that Cameron hadn’t yet held a meeting with him and colleagues about his EU renegotiation. Baron periodically stages these interventions at PMQs when he feels his leader is ignoring him. Today Cameron took the unusual step of confirming that he was ignoring Baron by telling him he thought he’d already made up his mind on Europe and therefore it wasn’t worth taking up too much of his time.

But aside from that, the rest of the Commons appeared as dangerous to Cameron as a safari park where all the animals have been given something to make them a bit drowsy.