At PMQs, Corbyn wasn’t prepared for Theresa May’s bombshell about the landing cards

Across the despatch boxes, your humble correspondent has never seen a more spectacular pole-axing

Misguided and unhelpful though it is to couch Prime Minister’s Questions in pugilistic terms, this one should have been stopped in the third.

It was a contest Theresa May should have lost. All the money was going against her, as it does when you are simultaneously the prime minister and the home secretary responsible having been erroneously threatening ethnic minority pensioners with deportation.

But in response to Jeremy Corbyn’s third question, she caught the Labour leader with the kind of blow that sends the medics rushing in even before shoulder blade has struck canvas.

All Corbyn had to do was, essentially, call Theresa May a disgrace for six questions in a row. The cruelty of the Home Office, the “hostile environment” Theresa May boasted of having replaced. But on Tuesday, new, seemingly devastating information emerged on in the ongoing Windrush scandal, that the misery currently being heaped upon Jamaican pensioners unable to prove their right to remain in the UK has been made significantly worse by the Home Office’s decision to destroy their landing cards in 2010.

Corbyn wanted to know whether, as home secretary in 2010, May had taken the decision to destroy the landing cards.

The prime minister has spent several hours at the despatch box already this week, speaking entirely matter of factly, which is the preferred tone for matters of war and peace. But never has she uttered something quite so plainly as, “The decision to destroy the landing cards was taken in 2009 under a Labour government.”

Across the despatch boxes, your humble correspondent has never seen a more spectacular pole-axing. The Conservative benches erupted as if witnessing a last minute winner in the World Cup Final. Desmond Swayne roared like a triumphant silverback gorilla. He may even have leapt to his feet and hammered his fists into his chest. (Certainly, it cannot be ruled out.)

The speaker intervened to tell them, quite rightly, that the general public finds such behaviour “disgusting”. But the speaker always does this. It makes no impact and it never will. Where the general public has got it wrong, of course, is when you’ve been wrongly threatening ethnic minority pensioners with deportation. What matters is not what you’re doing about it, but whether or not a fraction of the blame for it can be shifted on to someone else.

Corbyn staggered on punch-drunk. He even made it to his sixth question, now well established as his viral video rant, and again blamed the government for “destroying documents” entirely unabashed by the new information he had acquired.

The details would, of course, become clearer in the immediate aftermath. The UK Border Agency had independently ordered the destruction of the landing cards in 2009, not a Labour home secretary. And it was only later Conservative policy, enacted by Theresa May as home secretary, that required these early Commonwealth immigrants to have to prove their right to remain. In other words, at the point at which their destruction was ordered, they had no value.

Indeed, this was precisely the analysis offered on social media, in real time, by a former Corbyn adviser Matt Zarb-Cousin, but it eluded his old boss.

Would a more nimble Commons performer have avoided the blow? Who knows. Corbyn was out for the count. Though, naturally, he’ll back to fight on next week.