Lloyd Evans

Open up your political lexicons. Inscribe this one in permanent ink. We’ll be laughing about it for years to come. Answering a question at PMQs on budget reductions, Gordon Brown promised that in 2013/14 there would be ‘a zero percent rise’ in spending. This bizarre piece of tweak-onomics was flung straight back at him by David Cameron. ‘That answer will get zero percent,’ said Dave. He then produced a Treasury report confirming that spending will shrink in the medium term. Brown wriggled and shifted and changed the subject clumsily. ‘The debate is about this – how to return to jobs and growth in the economy.

Make the chair smaller. Or sit on a box. John Bercow’s first overhaul of parliamentary structures should involve re-fitting the seat to accommodate his pint-sized proportions. He looked a little stranded up on his perch at PMQs today and at the end he had to be helped back down to the ground. This was a decent enough start. His touch might be lighter but he has bundles of confidence in the house. A welcome change. The last chap, already I can barely remember his name, was the Speaker who couldn’t speak. Bercow can’t stop speaking. His justly praised oratorical skills would be perfect if he weren’t such an Orator when displaying them. At times he seemed to want to play the game rather than refereeing it. In a break with tradition he wore a plain academic gown.

Crack! The sound of the whips lashing Labour MPs into line today was deafening. And the truth didn’t have a prayer. What a draining, depressing, undemocratic spectacle it was to see Labour’s doomed time-servers put in yet another shift at the government’s whopper-factory. Cameron went to the House with a single tactic, to get the PM to admit that Labour must and will cut spending. Did Brown admit it? Fat chance. Instead he insisted that spending was going up. Not just current spending but capital spending too. Up, up up. He hammered home the notion that the Tories will lower spending by ten percent and lower inheritance tax ‘for the few not the many.’ Cameron was dogged, impatient, sometimes exasperated but he masked his impatience with a few decent quips.

Usually it’s the war-dead who overshadow the start of PMQs. Today it was the undead. Brown is back and if the Labour rebels really believed his promise to ‘listen’ their trust seems to have been misplaced. This was the Brown of old, the unbudgeable slab of granite, the obsessive numerologist casting statistics in all directions like a witchdoctor sprinkling charms to ward off evil. Two planted questions gave him a chance to bring up the ‘ten percent reduction’ allegedly referred to by Andrew Lansley in this morning’s interview about Tory spending plans. Brown seemed to be cruising at this point.

Would you Adam and Eve it? The Prime Minister actually seemed to enjoy PMQs today. With the whole of Westminster abuzz with whispered plots and covert knife-sharpenings perhaps the Commons seemed a haven of openness and civility by contrast. Brown got off to a lousy start though. He stuttered and fumbled through the names of the war dead, scuffing consonants, garbling regiments. And he finished the tribute on a weird note of grandiloquent defiance as if he were writing the epitaph of Gordon Brown, RIP, and his clique of apostles. ‘These men are exceptionally great men. And their service shall not be forgotten!’   Cameron got up. What an easy job: Six penalties against a goalie with no arms or legs. But he couldn’t find the angle.

The Speaker presided over his own memorial service today. The PM led the tributes by reminding us that Michael Martin had spent thirty years living off the rest of us – sorry – contributing to public life. Cameron said thanks for the help he received as a parliamentary fresher in 2001. Even wobbly-jowled Tory shiresman Nicholas Winterton declared that Martin had been "kind and caring". It sounded as if he was talking about a spaniel. The main punch-up was much brisker than usual. Someone in Central Office has been playing with a stopwatch and has noticed that Brown only listens to the first five seconds of any question. That’s how long it takes him to decide what to answer. So if the question lasts less than five seconds he’s in trouble.

A quiet, chastened, nervous House of Commons today. Like a bunch of naughty schoolboys caught wrecking the art-block and forced to clean it up. The Prime Minister, looking even more dank and grotty than usual, faltered as he recited the names of last week’s war dead from Afghanistan. By contrast Cameron’s bright, youthful demeanour served him well as he once again outclassed the PM on expenses. Cameron suggested saving £6m by scrapping the new £10k ‘communications allowance’ for members which, he said, merely allowed MPs to tell the world how wonderful they were. The PM tried to play the lofty man of principle but he sounded feeble and indecisive.

Impressions, rather than substance, dominated today’s PMQs. With the Brown premiership downgraded from stable to critical over the weekend, this could have been a career-terminating ordeal for the soggy-eyed old panda but he got through it pretty well. By the end he was still confidently afloat, if not quite buoyant. Cameron raised the question of Brown’s authority. Brown counter-attacked. Why didn’t Cameron ask about policy rather than reducing everything ‘to personality’? Cameron insisted that Brown himself was the issue. Quoting long and embarrassing chunks from Hazel Blears’s weekend tirade he asked, ‘Why’s she still in the cabinet? His government simply cannot go on.

A total cheat at PMQs today. It was a swine flu swindle. Only a week has passed since Labour’s manifesto-busting tax-hikes were announced in Darling’s bankruptcy budget and the MPs' expenses scandal is still pumping out clouds of noxious smoke and yet Cameron allowed himself to be persuaded that the pig-bug business equals a State of Emergency. If Cameron agreed to a truce today he was duped. Rather than hammering the prime minister he joined him in a stage-managed recital of announcements and statistics.  So what if a few million extra masks have been ordered? The health secretary should deal with that. People watch PMQs for a cage-fight that reveals the competing strengths of the parties.