PMQs sketch: What’s the cunning plan? Someone must have one

The Prime Minister’s cunning plan is to have no plan, as Private Baldrick never said

Mr Corbyn has made several unsuccessful attempts at extracting from Ms May what the plan is for Brexit (PA)

If you have a reputation, even among your own supporters, for being a touch on the useless and incompetent side, one thing you might make sure to do would be, when quoting a fictional character whose dramatic purpose is incompetence and uselessness, to actually quote something that character has actually ever said.

But it was not to be. Jeremy Corbyn had had a couple of unsuccessful goes at extracting from Theresa May quite what the plan is for Brexit, for which the publicly available information still does not extend further than “getting the best deal for Britain” – the one thing that cannot possibly be true, because the best deal for Britain would be to stay in the European Union.

In fact, the Labour leader suggested, the Prime Minister was like Private Baldrick, “who said that his cunning plan was to have no plan”.

Except that, well, he didn’t. The precise point of Baldrick was that he always, without fail, in every situation, had a plan. The problem was that they never worked. Baldrick had a plan to save the life of King Charles I by replacing his head with a pumpkin. He had a plan to carve his name into a bullet and keep it in his pocket, so as to not be killed by the “bullet with my name on it”. He had a plan to solve his mother’s low ceiling by cutting off her head (a plan that retroactively confirms him as a Leave voter).

Baldrick was many things, but one thing he never lacked, was a plan. In any event, that was as exciting as it got. At one point Jeremy Corbyn also accused Boris Johnson of causing “unnecessary certainty” over Brexit – not something that has ever before been levelled at the Foreign Secretary.

Credit to Mr Corbyn, who did at least manage a few questions on Brexit, a rather unimportant topic he usually prefers to avoid altogether. Ms May’s Brexit, whatever it is, was again branded a “chaotic Brexit”, which it would appear to be, though certainly rather less chaotic than had she been able to deploy at Article 50 at dawn on 24 June, which was the Labour leader's plan at the time.

Right at the end, there was a word about driverless vehicles, which will apparently ease traffic flow in to the newly enlarged Heathrow when it is or isn’t completed at some point in the next three millennia. It was an appropriate enough analogy. Before the referendum, both sides, and Michael Gove in particular, liked to talk about being trapped in the boot of a car with no control over where you’re going. He has proved to be correct. Five sixths of the House of Commons don’t want to leave the European Union, but that’s the destination that’s been put in the computer, which is coming back with an address of “certain doom” and an ETA of around 2019. And the doors are locked.

What would you do in such a situation? There's still two and a bit years to go. Can you blame them for making a bit of small talk? For fiddling about with the stereo. There were some murmers on HS2 here. Some mutterings on the West Midlands mayoral election there. Road investment strategy. Noise pollution. Air pollution. Even driverless vehicles.

None of it matters, they all know it. Someone will come up with a cunning plan in the end. Won’t they?