The Sketch: The Prime Minister muscles in again ... on Prime Minister's Question Time

Faced with the fine line that separates lunacy from insanity, David Blunkett has stepped decisively forward. He has gone from one to the other, we don't know in which direction. And I don't suppose it matters one whit. This is by the way.

The Prime Minister was treated to a rite of tribal loyalty by his back benches yesterday. After a week of accusations that he "muscled in" on any observable limelight, the Prime Minister muscled in on Prime Minister's Question Time. How his MPs cheered him. They roared approval, they shouted laughter, they did that approving rumble, they pointed, waved and made obscure and possibly obscene hand signals. He responded with a brilliant performance: submissive yet assertive, humble yet proud, strong but vulnerable. It made you feel admiring yet nauseated.

Iain Thing began by brandishing a needle but refrained from sticking it in.

He expressed sympathy for those killed in Israel two days ago, without asking Mr Blair whether he agreed with his wife's assessment of the situation.

He went on with his rhetorical strategy of checking the current status of old initiatives. He highlights a combination of spin and delivery failure. It should work better than it does.

Curfew orders on children, how many have been issued? The Prime Minister couldn't say exactly. Some thousands, surely, he suggested. None, the answer came back. Not one. Also, child safety orders had been announced as an eye-catching initiative four years ago and just 12 had been issued. Five thousand antisocial behaviour orders a year had been promised, 500 issued. Mr Blair replied with the hundreds, nay thousands of other things he'd done. Look at all the adult curfews. And 1,500 juvenile centres. "It simply is not the case that none of these orders is being used," he said uselessly.

Mr Thing said that crime was up by 850 crimes a day; it was up overall for the first time in a decade.

If we were scrabbling around for something positive to say about Mr Thing, here is one. Crime up for the first time in a decade. It has a historical perspective we can admire. These crime trends may have a very obscure relationship with government policy, whatever government was in power: police numbers were falling and so was crime. Iain Thing could do the same with the economy: Labour has merely continued a trend established under the Tories. Mr Thing won't do this. It means praising the Government. He doesn't see the advantages of doing that. But it's his only chance.

We trudged on. The tax on pension funds had in the past been justified by the buoyancy of the stock market, Mr Thing said. Did the Prime Minister regret that? Mr Blair stood up and said: "No, I don't," and then sat down to shouts of Labour laughter. They were showing us that they were showing him that they admired his cleverness.

Mr Thing went on: "How much longer will a man of the Prime Minister's age have to work before he's able to retire? Four more years!" This caused a paroxysm in the Labour benches. "Four more years!" they laughed. They held up four fingers. "Four more years!" Perhaps it was a double V-sign.

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