At PMQs today, Corbyn’s poor questioning on the NHS let Theresa May off the hook – again

Instead of a close-fought, forensic debate about how much more money the NHS needs and why Johnson thinks it needs so much more than May, we were straight into tedious ritual exchanges

It’s the hope that hurts. Jeremy Corbyn started so well. A simple, direct question: “Does the Prime Minister agree with the Foreign Secretary that the NHS needs an extra £5bn?” Old-style personalised knockabout, exploiting cabinet divisions – the kind of thing Corbyn is usually reluctant to do.

This could be a tough exchange, we thought, with the Government on the defensive. And Theresa May started reasonably well, too, asserting confidently that the recent Budget had allocated £6bn more to the NHS.

No it didn’t, said Corbyn. That was £2.8bn, “spread like thin gruel over two years”. Which is not quite right, but he was more right than she was. The important figure is the increase in NHS annual spending, and the extra funding for next year announced in the Budget was £2bn, some distance short of the £5bn demanded by Boris Johnson – although he did not apparently put a figure on it when he spoke in cabinet yesterday.

Instead of pressing the Prime Minister on where the rest of the money was, Corbyn moved on. He quoted A&E doctors who have written to her about patients being treated in corridors. “Who should the public believe: the Prime Minister or A&E doctors?”

I could tell you what Theresa May’s answer to that would be. And she gave it, at some length. All the pressure in the chamber escaped like a deflating balloon. Instead of a close-fought, forensic debate about how much more money the NHS needs and why Johnson thinks it needs so much more than May, we were straight into tedious ritual exchanges.

Corbyn’s habit of responding to the Prime Minister’s reply and then asking a different question allows her off the hook every time. By question three she had already bolted for the safety of the NHS in Labour-ruled Wales, where A&E waiting times are even worse than they are in England.

This prompted a long and confused attempted refutation from Corbyn. Apparently Wales’s poor NHS record is the Prime Minister’s fault for “underfunding the Welsh government”, but despite that, the Labour Party there had managed to increase NHS spending.

By now Theresa Mahy was so confident about defending the indefensible that she went for the bold gambit of saying the NHS’s problems are not just the lack of money. She told Corbyn: “The only answer he ever comes up with is the question of money.”

And she tried to suggest that some hospitals were missing their waiting-time targets because they were badly run. This hardly reflects well on the Conservatives, as all the waiting-time figures have become steadily worse since 2010.

But by now the chances of a serious debate had disappeared. Corbyn had turned it into Leader of the Opposition’s Questions, feeling obliged to respond to every one of Theresa May’s claims. First he defended Wales, then he rebutted her quotation of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which said there was “not much difference” between Labour and Tory spending plans at the last election: “A Labour government wouldn’t be underfunding the NHS.”

This was followed by the now-traditional speech designed for the news and social media clips, starting with “the Prime Minister is in denial” and ending with asking when she was “going to take action to save the NHS from death by a thousand cuts”.

It wasn’t really a question, and the Prime Minister didn’t try to answer it. Her waffling evasions don’t do her any good, and public opinion is already on Corbyn’s – and Boris Johnson’s – side. But it would be a public service if Corbyn could ask short, pointed and connected questions that explore how much more money the NHS really needs and expose how weak her arguments are.

After the hope of his opening question, Corbyn offered only painful disappointment.