Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Have we seen the last of the Maybot?

An astonishing PMQs. Theresa May no longer looks like a sheeted ghost. She’s quit the sick-bay and acquired a veneer of normality. Chipper, brisk, in command. Cheerful even. Jeremy Corbyn gave a lacklustre performance typified by the artless syntax of his opening phrase:

‘Her chaotic and incompetent government has driven our country into chaos.’

He probed her on the indicative votes but she shrugged him aside. Using a favourite ploy she poured scorn on his forensic skills. ‘He shouldn’t just read out the question he thought of earlier,’ she hectored. ‘Listen to the answer.’

She picked at Labour’s confused positions on the Customs Union and the second referendum. ‘What happened to straight-talking honest politics?’ she gloated cockily. She was enjoying herself.

Corbyn’s final question was like a stump-speech to a Marxist fringe-meeting. He droned on about ‘homelessness and knife crime’ and a Prime Minister, ‘stoking division.’

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