PMQs review: Corbyn supporters ought to be starting to have their doubts

David Cameron did not satisfactorily answer many of the questions he was asked, but the Labour leader couldn't embarrass him

If I were a Jeremy Corbyn supporter I'd be furious. I would think that David Cameron is a monster who is destroying this country and I'd see Prime Minister’s Questions as a chance to show all those non-voters and other potential Labour voters currently suffering from false consciousness the true awfulness of Tory government.

So I would have been disappointed with the Labour leader today, because I would have had an inkling that Cameron did not come across quite as badly as I think he should have done.

Corbyn started with a populist touch by wishing David Attenborough a happy 90th birthday and then paused to glare at Conservative MPs heckling him to say, “I haven’t asked a question yet.” He hadn’t, and he never really did.

His first non-question was about the EU Posting of Workers Directive. The European Commission wants to close loopholes in it, to “stop employers exploiting foreign workers and undercutting national rates of pay”. There was a question-mark at the end of the Hansard transcript, but it wasn’t clear what the question was. Corbyn appeared to want the Prime Minister to condemn the “grotesque exploitation of many workers across the continent”.

If Cameron was puzzled, he managed to hide it. He was all for workers’ rights, he said. After all, his Government had brought in the National Living Wage.

This prompted Corbyn to go off the script that had been written for him and to defend Labour’s record: “The national minimum wage was introduced by Labour. The National Living Wage proposed by the Prime Minister’s friend the Chancellor is, frankly, a corruption of the very idea. It is not, in reality, a proper living wage.”

Everyone knows what Corbyn meant. The Government’s Living Wage is higher than Labour’s minimum wage, but it is not as high as the living wage advocated by the Living Wage Campaign. But what was the point of bringing that up? To draw attention to the Conservatives’ theft of a core Labour policy?

Corbyn realised he had blundered and tried to clarify – “I support a wage rise, obviously” – before asking his third non-question, a ramble about tax havens. By the time he got to his fifth question, he put his head down and just read out his script: whether Conservative Members of the European Parliament would be voting for “country-by-country tax transparency reporting”.

Cameron said he supported the proposals, although I suspect he was the only other person in the Chamber who knew what Corbyn was talking about, although he failed to say whether Tory MEPs supported them too.

But if that is the weakest point in the Prime Minister’s defences today, Corbyn was not going to be carried shoulder high back to his office for identifying it.

If I were a particularly partisan Corbyn supporter, I would have noticed that Cameron did not satisfactorily answer many of the questions asked of him, by the Labour leader and – rather more obviously – by other Labour MPs such as Jess Phillips and Keir Starmer. And I might have gone on Facebook or Twitter to condemn the mainstream media for failing to report that the Prime Minister didn’t answer about tax havens, child refugees, women’s refuges and the London housing market.

But I would secretly have wished that Corbyn was better at asking short questions that Cameron didn’t want to be asked, better at thinking on his feet, and better at using the theatrical props of humour, variety and rhetoric to embarrass the Prime Minister. I would not admit it to anyone, but I would know media bias against him is not enough of an excuse.

Ben Chu and I discussed PMQs on Facebook video