PMQs sketch: Cameron laughs off Clegg’s pain
PMQS has become a forum for pitiful over-rehearsed jokes. You weren’t expecting wit or content, were you?
By Ian Dunt
It must surely be the worst collection of jokes outside of a Russell Howard gig. Bad joke after bad joke after bad joke. Flashman references after Eddie the Eagle references after Michael Winner references. It was to politics what phone sex lines are to intercourse.
There was no wit and there was no content. There was merely the conveyor belt of rehearsed jokes and quick stabbing motions that constitute PMQs under Ed Miliband and David Cameron.
The Labour leader’s tactics are now well understood. He began with that mock innocent first question which invariably starts: “How would the prime minister rate his progress on.” The sentence ends with whichever policy area is causing Cameron the most grief, from tuition fees to the forestry sell-off. Today it was the NHS, not for the first time.
Cameron did a Gordon Brown and started reeling off an impenetrable list of governmental achievements. When he mentioned the number of doctors, Miliband got in a rare effective response. “In case the prime minister doesn’t realise, it takes seven years to train a doctor,” he said casually. “So I’d like to thank him for his congratulations on our record.”
The Labour leader wasn’t above quoting some stats himself and before you knew it he was commenting on rising waiting times. That was a honey trap and once he stepped in it Cameron got his knife out. Waiting times were actually dropping, the Tory leader insisted. “It is important when we come to this House and make statements that are inaccurate that we correct the record at the earliest opportunity,” Cameron said cruelly. Miliband refused to do so. One of them will end up with egg on their face over this, if anyone is capable of remembering such a dreary half-hour session. Already I can feel my subconscious trying to wipe it from my memory, like some horrible childhood trauma.
Miliband then found his most competent attack. “Where is the health secretary?” he asked, raising the depressing mental image of Andrew Lansley, alone in a room somewhere, his career ruining the carpet. “It’s becoming a pattern with this prime minister. This morning in the papers we see the universities minister being dumped on for his tuition fees policy, we see the schools secretary being dumped on for his free schools policy and the poor deputy prime minister – he just gets dumped on every day of the week.”
It was the most effective attack anyone delivered this PMQs because it had a ring of truth to it. Cameron’s chairman-image has protected him when ministers are under fire. But Miliband had found a flip side to that. It’s an important attack and one that can be deployed regularly. For a moment, I thought the Labour leader was going to wipe the floor with Cameron. But it only lasted a moment.
An attack on shadow health secretary John Healey saw Miliband reply: “We read in the papers about a PMQs makeover. It didn’t last very long. Flashman is back.” Instantly, Miliband lost all his hard-earned points. “The thing is Flashman doesn’t answer the question.” Mass groaning prevailed, with that strange sense of time passing too slowly and wrinkles forming visibly on our bodies.
Cameron wasn’t satisfied. He had his own terrible rehearsed jokes to get out and he was determined to communicate them. “I have to admit some of the recent cultural references I’ve made have been a bit out of date,” he said. “But I have to say when I look at the honourable gentleman, who told us the fightback would start in Scotland, he rather reminds me of Eddie the Eagle.” It was like an interminable dinner date with one of those tiresome fools who love to quote Monty Python at length.
He’d managed to keep his temper under control for some time at this point, but Cameron suddenly allowed a flash of anger to come across him as he urged Miliband to “for once in his life deal with the substance”. It gave Miliband his in, whereupon he urged the PM to “calm down, dear”. I bet it had them in stitches in Labour HQ. Perhaps he thought he was being clever and subversive after the row a fortnight ago. Needless to say, it was met with silence.
In a sign of how utterly dull the session had become, Miliband ended by assuring the country that “you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS”. It’s a stock phrase that was dull decades ago and remained dull when Gordon Brown said it. Miliband has ended PMQs with it twice now. You can draw your own conclusions from that.
For some reason it made Cameron lose his rag altogether. “There’s only one party you can trust on the NHS, and it’s the one that I lead,” he barked. Nick Clegg, seated fittingly to Cameron right-hand side, looked even more downcast than he did before – which was very downcast indeed.
It didn’t matter. Not to us anyway. Cameron had finally given us a punchline worth laughing at.
