Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theresa May flounders horribly at PMQs

Best mates on Brexit, deadly foes on everything else. The highly suspicious search for a Lab/Con Brexit accord was suspended today as the party leaders exchanged blows at PMQs. These covert ‘talks’ are clearly a blackmail effort contrived in Downing Street. By threatening her MPs with a Labour-backed Customs Union, Theresa May hopes to secure their support for her thrice-rejected withdrawal agreement. It might just work.

The EU wasn’t mentioned at PMQs but the Labour leader found alternative sources of distress.

‘Things are getting worse,’ he crowed at the Prime Minister as he ran through a hit-parade of sob-stories: inequality, malnutrition, rising crime, falling police numbers and care-home failures. There’s never a dearth of gloom when Jezza opens his gob. Bad news puts a spring in his step.

He mentioned that life expectancy has fallen for the first time since 1945. And he scored a hit. May locked herself in a syntactical time-machine.

‘It is not the case,’ she said, ‘that people are expecting to live shorter lives than they have done in the future’. She meant ‘in the past.’ But Corbs failed to exploit the boob. He revealed that life expectancy has shrunk by just ‘six months’. Well, that’s not too bad is it? And if everything is ‘getting worse’ under the Tories then a fall in longevity must mean a rise in the overall sum of human happiness. Mr Jezhnev should be urging Mrs Dithers to bump off more of us, pronto.

‘Things are getting worse,’ he intoned yet again. He found this soundbite so inspiring that he used it five times in all. And he dug his knife into an agonising Tory wound: foodbanks.

As a preamble, he mentioned that the UK is ‘one of the richest countries on earth.’

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