Pmqs

Christmas is excellent news for a Labour opposition. The season of goodwill throws rich and poor into sharp relief. Red-faced aldermen gather at loaded tables to gobble up roast goose and plum-duff. And afterwards they throw sixpences at starving chimney-sweeps who scrabble for crusts of bread in the snow. At least that’s how it should be. But Labour is in trouble this year. A dearth of bad news has gripped the country. There’s a chronic shortage of shortages. And the lack of a serious crisis is reaching crisis proportions. Ed Miliband is suffering. He looked positively nauseous as he stood up at PMQs and applauded the ‘welcome’ fall in joblessness.

Christmas is here. And Ed Miliband’s script writers have already got their present. The sack. Really, he seems to have let them go. At PMQs he was reading out insults that pre-date Nicholas Parsons. Out of touch, complacent, the plaything of millionaires. Cameron can fight off such jibes his sleep. Tory backbenchers asked questions full of happy economic tidings. Conservative constituencies are alive with commercial euphoria. New investment, new apprentices, new customers. It’s all thanks to this wise and decisive government. Cameron duly lapped up the credit. Peter Lilley revealed his personal remedy for the proposed pay hike for MPs. ‘Re-table the Boundaries Commission report!’ he advised. In other words fewer MPs

Crash-bang-wallop. The chances of a Lib-Lab pact in 2015 have just gone hurtling through the floor. David Cameron is away in Beijing looking for Chinese venture capitalists who can turn Britain into the new Africa. Nick Clegg took his place at PMQs. He lost no time socking it to Labour. They were intellectually bankrupt, he said, and economically illiterate. Their energy policy was a con. And union stooges were swamping their membership lists. Harriet Harman hit back. ‘Leave it to us to worry about our party members,’ she said, ‘especially as so many of them used to be his.’ She dismissed Clegg’s favourite idea that he acts as a brake on

Commentators sometimes like to describe a particular session of Prime Minister’s Questions as ‘vintage’. If ‘vintage’ is the correct description for the good weeks, this one was more of a serving of tepid Blue Nun. David Cameron was in a very odd mood indeed. He was clearly pleased with an early quip referencing Miliband’s Desert Island Discs appearance. He joked that Miliband ‘isn’t loving Marx, he’s loving Engels instead’. The joke was so dreadful that the entire Chamber convulsed as though winded by a fast-moving cricket ball. Miliband attacked the Prime Minister on his inconsistency over payday loan caps and climate change policy. This was a good theme, and gave

It started as soon as Ed Miliband stood up at PMQs today. ‘Nightmare!’ yelled the Tories. ‘Nightmare!’ They’d been fired up by the first question from Steve Brine, who craftily double-loaded his query. He referenced the Co-op bank and the ‘nightmare email’ in one sentence. Would the PM respond, he asked, ‘to grave concerns about the nightmare unfolding at the Co-operative?’ Cameron pretended to be all serious. He fretted about the regulatory controls and about safeguarding the bank without fleecing the tax-payer. ‘Nightmare!’ goaded the Tories. Ed Balls, seated beside Miliband, flushed puce. Not a natural Trappist, the shadow chancellor is clearly under orders to shut his gob during PMQs.

It was a doddle for Ed Miliband at PMQs this afternoon. The nation watched agog yesterday as the energy companies deployed a handful of silk-lined suits to justify their price hikes to a parliamentary committee. Miliband arrived at the house knowing that victory was simple. He just had to fuse the Tories and Big Energy in the public mind and then sit back and enjoy the results. But he got ambushed by David Cameron who had a surprise document up his sleeve. Miliband’s fuel bill. First Cameron reminded us of his advice to consumers last week. ‘Switch your energy company and save £200.’ This idea had been instantly derided by

At PMQs today, the Tories’s energy policy went bi-polar. The Conservatives now seem to touch both extremes of the debate. For eight years they’ve presented themselves as a gang of happy tree-huggers who applaud every green subsidy going. But today David Cameron announced his plan to ‘roll back some of the green regulations and charges’. John Major started it all. Yesterday he lurched back into front-line politics by suggesting that energy companies should pay a windfall tax this winter. Otherwise, he said, the poor will have to choose between starving or freezing to death. Number 10 called this bombshell ‘interesting’. Ed Miliband asked David Cameron if John Major was now

The Clangers are back. And not just on television. At PMQs, both the party leaders tried to embarrass each other with solecisms, exaggerations – and, yes, clangers – which they’d dropped in the past. Ed Miliband led with the cost of living crisis and said ‘record numbers are now working part-time’. Cameron retaliated with a Miliband prediction from October 2010. ‘The government programme will lead to the disappearance of one million jobs,’ Wrong! A million jobs have been created. Miliband brought up his pet-policy, the energy bill freeze, and accused Cameron of supporting the Big Six fuel giants. A price con, not a price freeze, said Cameron. And why had

Here’s a favourite Tory joke. Question: What does ‘BBC’ stand for? Answer: Buggers Broadcasting Communism. David Cameron seemed tempted to try this gag at PMQs today. He mentioned the Beeb four times in sardonic asides. ‘Let’s praise the BBC for once,’ he said, bitingly. He woke this morning, he said, to a BBC report stating that public satisfaction with council services had risen despite the cuts. ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’ He berated Ed Miliband for wanting to introduce new decarbonisation targets. ‘Even the BBC doesn’t agree with that.’ And he attacked Milband’s promise to freeze energy bills as evidence that ‘he’d like to live in a