Pmqs

Theresa May should have had a rather difficult Prime Minister’s Questions today. Jeremy Corbyn chose to lead on the visit of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, and then moved onto rough sleeping. Both matters are vulnerabilities for May, and ones Corbyn has consistently made a great deal of noise about. But there were two flaws in Corbyn’s approach which allowed May to have one of her strongest sessions as Prime Minister. The first was that of course she had guessed the Labour leader was most likely to lead on Saudi Arabia, and so she turned up well-prepared to offer a robust defence of Britain’s ties with the Kingdom. She

Bit of a rum PMQs today. Jeremy Corbyn, who has always loathed the EU and now pretends to admire it, asked May about Brexit. May, who has always admired the EU and now pretends to loathe it, fobbed him off with glib sound-bites. ‘Take back control of our borders,’ ‘protect workers’ rights,’ and so on. Corbyn asked a long question about the Government’s ‘desired outcome’. He got a four-word answer: ‘A bespoke economic partnership.’ Mr Speaker decided that he should be the star-turn today. Perhaps he sought to wow a posse of French MPs who were witnessing the bun-fight from the gallery. Quelling an early outbreak of shouting, the Speaker

Boris Johnson came up early in PMQs. The Cabinet’s new ‘shadow chancellor’ has called for extra money – five billion quid – to be lavished on the NHS. Jeremy Corbyn asked Mrs May if she agreed. She dustily replied that the real chancellor had promised more than five billion last autumn. He’d pledged six! Six billion didn’t satisfy Mr Corbyn. He called the Prime Minister out by cutting her pledge in half and subtracting £200m. This gave £2.8bn which, he, said, had been ‘spread like thin gruel over two years.’ Good word, gruel. Evocative of prison-hulks and Dickensian poor-houses. It adds colour to Labour’s dream-picture of the Tories as a set

What happens to a woman who leaves domestic violence? A layman’s impression might be that she gets on with her life and tries to forget what happened to her. But a question today in the House of Commons showed that this is just not the case. The SNP’s Lisa Cameron asked Theresa May about a constituent of hers who had left her violent partner: ‘A constituent of mine has informed me that she was repeatedly raped and beaten by her ex-partner, requiring an injunction. Much to her horror, her bank would not close their joint account unless she attended with the perpetrator. When banks are left to their own discretion,

Anyone hoping that 2018 would bring an improvement in the quality of debate between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, or a reduction in the length of John Bercow’s interventions, would have been disappointed by today’s session. Corbyn and May traded the usual blows on the NHS. There was little in the exchanges that was enlightening. Jeremy Corbyn listed examples of people being treated in car parks, Theresa May said that the NHS had been better prepared for winter than ever before. She then tried to turn the conversation to the shortcomings of the NHS in Labour-run Wales. The rest of the session wasn’t much more enlightening either. Indeed, Justine Greening’s

The last PMQs before the Christmas recess often has a rather pantomime atmosphere. Unfortunately, neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Theresa May are anywhere near nimble enough to be able to create anything more than the sort of play that everyone leaves at the interval – and today’s performance wasn’t helped by John Bercow’s decision to extend the previously half an hour session to 53 minutes with no apparent good reason. The Speaker himself contributed to the overrunning PMQs by providing interesting details about MPs’ weddings that he’d been invited to. Jeremy Corbyn had one Christmas pun, which was about there being ‘no room at the A&E’. Quite a difficult pun for

Both Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May turned up in good form to PMQs today. The Labour leader was unusually nimble with his ripostes, deploying statistics on home ownership straight after the Prime Minister’s mockery of the Labour party’s attitude towards home ownership. But as usual, he didn’t manage to make the homeslessness figures that he made his key theme for his questions into a matter of great discomfort for May. The Prime Minister, for her part, managed to recover from each attack pretty well, arguing that the Conservatives were the party who believed in building more homes so that people could have a roof over their heads. She did, though,

Remarkably, Theresa May made it through PMQs today pretty much unscathed. I cannot, though, report that this was because she launched a brilliant counter-attack or came with a way to break through the current Brexit impasse. Rather it was because Jeremy Corbyn’s questions lacked forensic precision. One suspects that if Robin Cook had been at the other despatch box, May would have had a far tougher time. There was a collective parliamentary failure today because, at the end of the 45 minute session of PMQs, we knew no more about the state of the Brexit negotiations than we did when we went in. When the DUP’s Jim Shannon asked for

Jeremy Corbyn rarely talks about Brexit at Prime Minister’s Questions, and it is interesting that he chose today’s session, which will get little attention as a result of the Budget, to probe Theresa May on the matter. The Labour leader did have a good stint, quoting a number of European negotiators, Tory backbenchers and Cabinet Ministers who have made comments to the effect that the British government doesn’t know what it is doing on Brexit. He also accused the Tories of blocking measures protecting workers’ rights and acknowledging that animals are sentient beings. But Theresa May was on good form, too, continuing to appear as though she is regaining her

PMQs was always going to be a more serious affair than usual this week, given the questions about how Westminster and the political parties have handled serious allegations of sexual abuse. Theresa May began the session by saying that she was inviting all party leaders to a meeting to discuss the launch of an independent, grievance procedure. Jeremy Corbyn made clear he would be happy to attend this meeting. But he then proceeded to question Theresa May about a tax loophole involving the Isle of Man. The exchanges were not particularly illuminating. But later on Lisa Nandy stood up and said she had told Theresa May three years ago that

This week marks two years since Jeremy Corbyn was announced as the Labour leader. When he took over, he promised to shake up the way Prime Minister’s Questions was done, to make it more about the voters and less about the political point-scoring. But interestingly, he has now settled into a rather effective political routine. Corbyn now runs through a series of policy areas on which the Tories look weak, almost regarding Theresa May’s answers as incidental to the process rather than the prompt for him to probe more and point out that she hasn’t answered the question at all. This is probably a wise move, given Theresa May tries

Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May spent their lunchtime talking about McDonalds. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, it was McStrike, rather than a lunchtime order, that dominated her first PMQs since the summer recess. Asked to show support for those workers currently taking industrial action against the fast food giant, May would only say that it was a matter for McDonalds – before going on to attack Labour for not doing more to tackle zero hour contracts when they were in government. This felt evasive and allowed Corbyn to go on and pit her against the side of the workers when he asked about the government’s diluted plans to crackdown on corporate excess. Although Corbyn

Tories are worried. The holiday season is here. And the last time their leader took a break – in Snowdonia – she came back with a brilliant plan to replace her comfortable majority with a coalition of rudderless squabblers. She seemed aware of this today and her costume exuded Tory vitality. She was power-dressed in a shoulder-padded tunic of eye-dazzling blue. A lightning-bolt of pure Thatcher. She was helped by her cabinet. The message about discipline seems to have got through to the conspirators and they laid on a theatrical ambush for Jeremy Corbyn. As soon as the Labour leader mentioned ‘bickering ministers’ the entire front bench erupted in a

Mrs May couldn’t make PMQs today. She was lunching with royalty up at the Palace. The happy atmosphere of the event may have been affected by territorial anxieties. The Queen’s principal guest, King Felipe VI, reigns over important parts of the Spanish mainland but not the pointy little bit down at the bottom which is full of pubs and red phone boxes. MPs were keen to ask the government to re-assert Britain’s possession of Gibraltar. And some believe that this claim should extend to other historically British regions: Malaga, Torremolinos and Ibiza. Mrs May’s place was taken by the recently elevated Damian Green. His personality is like his skull. Smooth,