The worst PMQs ever? For the timebeing, yes

On the eve of elections all round the nation, the Prime Minister treated us all to a truly vital exercise in manufactured outrage about the Middle East

Jeremy Corbyn confronts David Cameron at PMQs (Parliament Channel/screengrab)

From its usual starting position just above the foot of the Mariana Trench, this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions didn’t so much go downhill as rocket launch itself into the white hot centre of the earth.

“Why, in a free country, you would stand for election to a parliament, be elected to that parliament, and then get up and ask a question you’ve been told to ask...Come on. I don’t get it. I just don’t get it,” said the late Charlie Kennedy not that long ago, in a TV documentary filmed shortly before his death.

With that in mind, we turn first to the contribution of Conservative Karl McCartney MP who, in an act of great public service to his Lincolnshire constituents began proceedings by asking, “My Right Honourable friend the Prime Minister if he would join me in condemning the actions and propaganda of Hezbollah and Hamas?”

You will not be shocked to learn that the Prime Minister obliged him, and so by the time Jeremy Corbyn got up to speak, we were already knee deep in the mire of who had “shared a platform” with which particular extremists, who wasn’t “friends” with what terrorist organisation, and other such edifying realities as are currently steeling the general public for yet more record low turnouts in Thursday’s elections.

What can you do? It's the twenty first century after all, and we the audience should by now be sufficiently educated in the ways of political life for it frankly to be unreasonable of us not to expect to be lied to (that was Vince Cable’s defence for the tuition fee promise, by the way), so it almost seems uncharitable to refer, again, to the words uttered by David Cameron last September at Jeremy Corbyn’s first PMQs, that: “If this is to become a session in asking questions and answering them, no one would be more delighted than me.”

Corbyn, for his part, made vague attempts at questions on the social care budget and food banks, but each answer from the Prime Minister came with yet more suddenly urgent rage about Jeremy Corbyn having referred to representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’ when he hosted a parliamentary event on the Middle East Peace process several years ago. “He must withdraw those remarks…” “I ask him again…” “I ask him a final time… “ The Prime Minister regularly forgets on these occasions it his job to answer the questions not ask them, a fact of which you might imagine Speaker Bercow would not be shy to remind, but his preplanned Wednesday lunchtime put downs usually revolve around those ‘chuntering from a sedentary position’ so it’s possible he simply had no material to work with.

It’s possible too that Cameron was genuinely wound up. Corbyn had waited six months to make what might be recorded as his first personal attack on the Prime Minister, and it was a beauty. Cameron had begun his answers by congratulating Leicester City. “May I join the Prime Minister in congratulating Leicester City on their amazing achievement,” Corbyn replied. “I hope that what he has said is not an indication that he is going to support another football team, rather than sticking with the two that he has already.“

It was generous of SNP’s Angus Robertson, who was up next, to calmly remind the house of Cameron’s backing down on what’s known as the Dubs Amendment, and the agreement to let 3,000 unaccompanied Syrian children settle in the UK. Mercifully none have arrived yet. Were they to discover this is the best the Mother of Parliaments can do, they may not be inclined to bother.

This is, to an extent, standard practise with an election imminent. If Corbyn makes it anywhere near 2020, it scarcely bears thinking about.