PMQs verdict: Cameron and Miliband in furious agreement
David Cameron and Ed Miliband agree with each other over the need to cap payday loans. They therefore decided to spend half an hour shouting at each other about it.
Miliband for one was absolutely furious. The prime minister had agreed with him (good) but he had done so in a way that was "intellectually incoherent" (very, very bad).
You can almost hear the new election slogan on the doorsteps now: "Vote Labour: for intellectually coherent ways of capping interest rates on payday loans. Against intellectually incoherent ways of capping interest rates on payday loans." It will get the votes piling in by the bucketload.
Cameron too was pretty furious today, but mainly for Miliband's refusal to laugh at one of his jokes.
"I followed very carefully his interview on Desert Island Discs," began Cameron for no other reason other than to tell a joke his advisors had written for him.
"And I think it's fair to say he's no longer a follower of Marx, he's following Engels instead."
As jokes go, this one worked on several levels, none of which were particularly funny.
It required both above average levels of philosophical historical knowledge and the assumption that the audience had taken in and remembered every single exchange between the two men over the past two months.
It was therefore by parliamentary standards an absolute killer.
Miliband however was not impressed. "You'd have thought he would have spent his time being prime minister," he countered rather snootily. "I'm sorry the right honourable gentleman has had a slight sense of humour failure. I don't think that's a very good start to these exchanges," replied Cameron apparently genuinely hurt.
The rest of the session was fairly typical of recent weeks with the noise from the Conservative benches getting ever louder as we get closer to the general election.
"They're shouting because they have no answer," protested Miliband in another foray into student philosophy. They have no answer: therefore they shout, he might have added.
They quickly fell into the now predictable exchange of focus-grouped insults we're likely to see repeated every week for the next year and a half.
"I'll tell you whats a con, it's saying one thing before the election, and another afterwards," said Miliband by now on autopilot.
"People can see him sitting in his room desperate for more bad news to suit his long term political interests," replied Cameron in an almost automated pastiche of his previous attacks.
By the end, any sense of what the two men had been arguing about was lost, possibly even to them.
We knew that Miliband wanted to cap payday loans. We knew that Cameron now agreed with him. We also knew that both were bloody furious about it.
Snap verdict – Cameron: 1, Miliband 1.
