PMQs sketch: Cameron thinks cutting tax credits is fun

‘It’s getting longer and longer,’ grumped David Cameron at PMQs. A microphone picked up the aside as the session over-ran by 10 minutes.

Why the delay? First, the Speaker. He’s keen to give as many backbenchers as possible a chance to pass unrecognised on national TV. Secondly, he adores the limelight himself. At the slightest pretext he’s up on his feet demanding silence on behalf of an entity called ‘the public’. That’s his name for the handful of grumblers and job-seekers who write in each week to complain that politicians aren’t speaking in chapel whispers. Thirdly there’s the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who reacts to Tory jeers by standing statue-still and adopting the look of a masochistic scarecrow or a besieged tortoise. If there are martyrs in heaven awaiting promotion to sainthood they must resemble Corbyn being by heckled by Conservatives.

Some may regard Corbyn’s long-suffering glare as noble and virtuous. But with his glasses superglued half-way down his conk he looks like a cartoon of irascibility, a fed-up angler reeling in his fourth Space Hopper of the day.