PMQs: Cameron lands the blows with cheesy jokes

David Cameron managed to win Prime Minister’s Questions today by shoehorning in a series of smart one-liners about Ed Miliband’s leadership.

It says a lot about how the Prime Minister has managed to recover quite impressively from his defeat over Syria that he has been able to continue his ‘weak’ attack line. On that Thursday night in the Commons when the government lost its vote, it seemed that Cameron was dangerously weakened.

Today he threw out jokes about Miliband having ‘folded faster than a Bournemouth deck chair’, that the Labour leader ‘went to Bournemouth and he completely bottled it’ and that ‘he told us it was going to be Raging Bull, he gave us Chicken Run’. Cheesy, perhaps, but memorable.

Even if Ed Miliband is, as his colleagues hope, playing a long game with the unions of which his TUC speech was an attempt to calm things down rather than a showy confrontation, these jokes from Cameron show what a dangerous distraction the unions issue is for Labour, particularly when the Conservatives are already on a general election war footing.