Pmqs

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions saw the Maybot reactivated. Jeremy Corbyn decided to lead the session on the fallout from the Windrush row, widening out his questions to the flaws in the hostile environment policy on illegal immigration, and on who was to blame for these flaws being apparent but not fixed for so long. The exchanges very swiftly became a ding-dong between May and Corbyn as to whose fault the creation of a hostile environment policy actually was. Corbyn wanted to pin the policy on May, but also demanded that Amber Rudd resign for aiming to harden the policy. His questions were decent, but it was May herself who created

Would she resign over Windrush? Having spent nearly eight years at the heart of government, Theresa May was clearly deeply involved in the scandal, and as PMQs began she seemed nervous and ill-at-ease. Lispy almost. She started on safe ground by thanking the Windrush generation for their ‘massive contribution’ to modern Britain. Then she garbled Windrush and turned it into ‘Windruss’. Then came this: ‘For those who have mistakenly received letters challenging them, I want to… apologise to them – and to say sorry to anyone who (has been) caused confusion and anxiety…as a result of this.’ Prezza couldn’t have put it better. She was floundering and Corbyn had yet to ask

Poor Jeremy Corbyn seemed muted and cowed at PMQs. He stooped over the despatch box, his chin down, his voice murmuring like a trapped bluebottle, his stature loose and uncertain. He grizzled through his six questions without a trace of passion or conviction. He couldn’t even whip himself into his trademark strimmer-call of petulant outrage. Is he having a bit of a crisis? Last night Jewish protestors gathered outside parliament to denounce him. Which is rather ironic. One story has it that his parents met at an anti-Mosley rally. Perhaps the parents of a future Labour leader will meet at an anti-Corbyn march. May had brought up Labour’s anti-Semitism last week

Brexit is going well, apparently. And the prime minister seemed in chipper mood at PMQs. She was even enjoying herself. To neutrals this is a distressing sight. To fans of the Tory leader it must seem downright dangerous. History has taught us that when May feels she’s on top the world, the world promptly lands on top of May. Corbyn raised council tax. His theme was Tory misrule, higher bills and vanishing services. Privatisation fetishists at Northamptonshire, he said, had caused the council to implode entirely. May felt herself on solid ground as she fought back by cataloguing Corbyn’s troubles at council level which have led to two recent Labour

John Bercow, parliament’s anti-bullying tsar, was strangely reticent at PMQs today. The all-but-speechless Speaker limited himself to a single intervention. ‘Order! Lots of questions to get through. And they must be heard.’ That was it. Twelve brisk words. Usually he spends several minutes bobbing up and down and screeching at MPs about the importance of behaving decorously in the chamber, and ‘conducting themselves in a statesmanlike manner’ – one of his favourite phrases. Allegations of misconduct seem to have curbed his interfering verbosity. What a relief. With no interruptions from the umpire, the session moved fast for once. The Russian crisis has made the PM look imposingly Churchillian in the last

Jezza was on spectacularly dreary form at PMQs. He droned through a communique about International Women’s Day which made the celebration sound inexpressively dispiriting. The movement is all about ‘how far we’ve come and how far we have to go,’ he moaned. He sounded like an Arctic explorer giving a live commentary as he slices off his frost-bitten toes, one by one, with a pen-knife. May hadn’t mentioned Women’s Day. And Corbyn, by bringing it up, had laid himself open to attack. It was swift and deadly. And beautiful in its way. ‘Thank-you for telling me it’s International Women’s Day tomorrow,’ said May in a voice that was full of

Bit of a rum PMQs today. Jeremy Corbyn, who has always loathed the EU and now pretends to admire it, asked May about Brexit. May, who has always admired the EU and now pretends to loathe it, fobbed him off with glib sound-bites. ‘Take back control of our borders,’ ‘protect workers’ rights,’ and so on. Corbyn asked a long question about the Government’s ‘desired outcome’. He got a four-word answer: ‘A bespoke economic partnership.’ Mr Speaker decided that he should be the star-turn today. Perhaps he sought to wow a posse of French MPs who were witnessing the bun-fight from the gallery. Quelling an early outbreak of shouting, the Speaker

Boris Johnson came up early in PMQs. The Cabinet’s new ‘shadow chancellor’ has called for extra money – five billion quid – to be lavished on the NHS. Jeremy Corbyn asked Mrs May if she agreed. She dustily replied that the real chancellor had promised more than five billion last autumn. He’d pledged six! Six billion didn’t satisfy Mr Corbyn. He called the Prime Minister out by cutting her pledge in half and subtracting £200m. This gave £2.8bn which, he, said, had been ‘spread like thin gruel over two years.’ Good word, gruel. Evocative of prison-hulks and Dickensian poor-houses. It adds colour to Labour’s dream-picture of the Tories as a set

What happens to a woman who leaves domestic violence? A layman’s impression might be that she gets on with her life and tries to forget what happened to her. But a question today in the House of Commons showed that this is just not the case. The SNP’s Lisa Cameron asked Theresa May about a constituent of hers who had left her violent partner: ‘A constituent of mine has informed me that she was repeatedly raped and beaten by her ex-partner, requiring an injunction. Much to her horror, her bank would not close their joint account unless she attended with the perpetrator. When banks are left to their own discretion,

Anyone hoping that 2018 would bring an improvement in the quality of debate between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, or a reduction in the length of John Bercow’s interventions, would have been disappointed by today’s session. Corbyn and May traded the usual blows on the NHS. There was little in the exchanges that was enlightening. Jeremy Corbyn listed examples of people being treated in car parks, Theresa May said that the NHS had been better prepared for winter than ever before. She then tried to turn the conversation to the shortcomings of the NHS in Labour-run Wales. The rest of the session wasn’t much more enlightening either. Indeed, Justine Greening’s

The last PMQs before the Christmas recess often has a rather pantomime atmosphere. Unfortunately, neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Theresa May are anywhere near nimble enough to be able to create anything more than the sort of play that everyone leaves at the interval – and today’s performance wasn’t helped by John Bercow’s decision to extend the previously half an hour session to 53 minutes with no apparent good reason. The Speaker himself contributed to the overrunning PMQs by providing interesting details about MPs’ weddings that he’d been invited to. Jeremy Corbyn had one Christmas pun, which was about there being ‘no room at the A&E’. Quite a difficult pun for

Both Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May turned up in good form to PMQs today. The Labour leader was unusually nimble with his ripostes, deploying statistics on home ownership straight after the Prime Minister’s mockery of the Labour party’s attitude towards home ownership. But as usual, he didn’t manage to make the homeslessness figures that he made his key theme for his questions into a matter of great discomfort for May. The Prime Minister, for her part, managed to recover from each attack pretty well, arguing that the Conservatives were the party who believed in building more homes so that people could have a roof over their heads. She did, though,