PMQs sketch: Is it definitely too late to put the Germans in charge?

Jeremy Corbyn demanded proper parliamentary scrutiny of the Prime Minister's Brexit intentions, but simultaneously proved himself spectacularly not up to the job

Prime Minister's Questions is not getting any harder for the Prime Minister (Sky News)

Nothing so excites the British like the restoration of parliamentary sovereignty. Walk down any High Street from Sunderland to St Ives and ask any man or woman in the street what the referendum was all about and the answer you get will be the same: “If the European Court of Justice thinks it come over here, with the primacy of its legislation, and tell our House of Commons what it can and can’t do, well, it can think again.”

In fact, this was the verbatim answer, given to the Channel 4 News cameras by a chap in his sixties on Barnsley High Street a week before the referendum. Unfortunately for him, it fell to some liberal metropolitan elite type who’d never been north of Watford in their lives to do the subtitles and, unable to understand a thing he was saying, wrote, “It’s to stop the Muslims coming into this country. Simple as that,” but luckily the clip is still on Youtube so you can see the truth for yourself.

This wise man, and millions like him, have for long decades had to cope with the knowledge that ECJ directives are automatically transposed into UK law without being subject to scrutiny by either the House of Commons or the House of Lords, a jurisprudential travesty for which the English Defence League has no fewer than six separate chants.

So Jeremy Corbyn was absolutely right to raise this with Theresa May at Prime Minister’s Questions, the day after she had confirmed her intention to remove the UK from the single market and (though it’s unclear whether she realises this yet) the customs union.

24 hours after this long awaited speech had been given, the single most pressing question within it was why it had been delivered to an audience of diplomats in a Foreign Office mansion and not at the dispatch box of the House of Commons.

Mr Corbyn was also angry that there would be no meaningful debate on the government's aims for the negotiation in Parliament. He quoted the Prime Minister, who had called the referendum “a vote to restore our parliamentary democracy” and was nevertheless refusing parliament the opportunity to scrutinise the matter. “It is not so much the Iron Lady as the Irony Lady,” he said. A number of Labour backbenchers began digging for Australia, giving up only when someone showed them the foreign exchange rates.

With his next four questions, Mr Corbyn demanded to know how much Theresa May was intending to pay for access to the single market, a question so utterly pointless as to engender a fresh irony of its own. How can parliamentary scrutiny be so important, if parliament, at least on this demonstration, is so utterly incapable of scrutinising anything?

There was Her Majesty’s Leader of the Opposition, outraged at the idea that the Prime Minister’s infinitesimally complex Brexit deal might pass into law without the forensic eye of Parliament, yet he himself still appears not to understand the difference between access to and membership of the single market.

And he was far from alone. One of the still enduring arguments against the referendum itself is that referendums are by nature anathema to parliamentary democracy, a system of governemnt that works not through people making decisions themselves, but by transferring decision making power to a body of elected experts whose better judgement they trust. So when one such supposed expert, Nadine Dorries, stands up to congratulate the Prime Minister on her speech, noting that ‘the pound was the highest it had been in two years,’ you have something approaching a constitutional crisis on your hands.

It is almost boring to point out that Tuesday’s two per cent rise in sterling left the pound a mere twenty per cent down since the referendum. It’s distinctly possible Ms Dorries meant to say two weeks, but she is far from alone in the Mother of Parliaments in simultaneously celebrating the sterling detonating referendum result and its comparatively meagre rise yesterday, like a confused Chinese football fan who goes wild for every goal regardless of which team has scored it.

What do you do when the experts are idiots? Is it too late to put the Germans in charge?