Tom Peck's Sketch: Jeremy Corbyn expires again as Rosie makes her point

There may one day come a time that the Labour leader realises the public mailbag tactic is not working and can never work

Jeremy Corbyn, wearing a badge in support of trade unions, at PMQs (PA)

The myth that it is illegal to die in the Palace of Westminster has persisted for so long partly because it has been centuries since anyone put it to the test. So in one sense, Jeremy Corbyn’s auto-suicidal Labour Party must be thanked for its unflinching determination to discover the truth.

Anyone who has died, or appears if they may imminently do so – so the story goes – is hurriedly rushed over Westminster Bridge to St Thomas’ Hospital.

But whether the junior doctors who formed a picket line outside the wards all day would have bothered to break from their strike to attend to the slowest political hari kiri in recent times is, on the evidence, unlikely.

This was the second time in a month that Jeremy Corbyn has questioned the Prime Minister around a hundred yards away from an NHS hospital with a picket line of doctors standing across it, and it was the second time he failed to ask him anything about it. It was, in its own way, funny. This, in a week where David Cameron’s own mother had signed a petition against Tory cuts, and that didn’t get a mention either.

Corbyn doesn’t do personal attacks, that’s well known, so any “Your mum” stuff was always going to be out of the question, even if Mary Cameron had written in her own expectant “Dear Jeremy” letter explicitly for the purpose.

It’s hard to describe either of these as an open goal missed. Watch any of the compilations of “Hilarious Missed Open Goals” on YouTube and in every example, the player at least makes some vague attempt or other to propel the ball in the direction of the goal. In that sense, Corbyn is at least innovative.

The session began with a brave intervention from Mims Davies, the Conservative MP from Eastleigh, who was so gravely concerned about housing – “the number one issue in my constituency” – that she had no choice but to read out a list of the Government’s many policies on housing, and challenge the Prime Minister on whether he agreed with her that they were all a stunning success, which he did.

Mercifully, it was Corbyn’s turn next and everything got a little bit easier for the Prime Minister. “I have a letter from Rosie,” Mr Corbyn began, as the precursor to six questions on social housing. Nadia Murad, an Iraqi woman who was abducted by Isis and kept as a sex slave, was looking down in the public gallery, and she could not fail to have been moved by the plight of Rosie, who, it transpires, “is a woman in her twenties who is working hard but cannot afford to buy a house in London”.

It left David Cameron with no choice but to read out the same list of policies his planted questioner had only just finished. The Help to Buy Isa, the Help to Buy Guarantee, Help to Buy London, Better Buy Norfolk, the Free Homes Promise, The BetterWare Catalogue, whatever you want, Cameron will help you buy it.

There may one day come a time that Corbyn realises the public mailbag tactic is not working and can never work. This wasn’t it. Whatever the problem, “we have a strong economy, Labour just wants to borrow more money” will always be the answer, and it will always be effective. There’ll be more of the same the week after next. Labour’s walking cadaver fights on, dead and mysteriously alive.