Who won?

Sally Keeble: Harriet was like the last person up in a cricket team plugging away keeping up her end against a clever bowler.

David Cameron came with all kinds of carefully rehearsed attacks – quotes from Digby Jones, old treasury figures, patronising putdowns. But Harriet kept on batting away about the projected loss of 1.3 million jobs as a result of the austerity budget. George Osborne sneered, Nick Clegg squirmed, so for good measure she had a swipe at him too.

By the end she hadn’t won, but David Cameron hadn’t achieved much either, apart from showing that he’s worked out a lot of anti-Labour lines on the economy and jobs. They might work if he could convince anyone that he had any notion of what unemployment or poverty means. He had a good line on the peace pods, pointing out that they were in Harriet’s department, but they’d already been in the newspapers. Expect to see more stories like this about the Labour government.

One of David Cameron’s least attractive features is his inability to hide his contempt for the rest of the world, and especially for women. Telling a woman that “she’s got to understand” is a guaranteed turn-off.

One of his other unattractive, but I suspect politically tactical, features is his tendency to patronise. Two new backbenchers got a dose of it today. Stephen Lloyd the new Lib Dem from Eastbourne who was promised a meeting so he could talk about visa problems for overseas students. Any other Lib Dem who wants anything had better get in quickly while the mood lasts.

The other victim was Caroline Lucas – oh dear, I hope DC isn’t trying to get the Greens into his coalition too.

Conor Pope: Cameron seems to be in permanent ‘smarm’ mode these days. At least he used to have ‘angry’ and ‘pretending to care’ in his repertoire. He began by saying that he would give a “surprisingly full answer”… before completely avoiding the question, claiming that his projections on private sector job creation were the same as the mathematical statistic that is the 1.3 million fewer jobs in public services. Not an easy day for Cameron with the front pages of The Guardian and Indy and he didn’t handle it well. He needs to move on from both the quoting needless spending from government departments, which now just sounds trite, and the “It was your government that got us in this mess” line, which is turning into an embarrassing catchphrase which will surely come back to bite him – how long before a Labour leader says “It was your government that got us into this mess”? Harman takes this one easily.

Rob Chesworth: I’m afraid I think DC won today, however aggravating I find his acerbic tone. HH unsurprisingly took the prime minister to task over public sector unemployment and a projected 1.3 million job cuts that the treasury are seemingly aware of and yet refuse to publish figures attesting to this. Again rather unsurprisingly Cameron launched into a stump speech about all figures being released independently through the OBR, and reiterated that the OBR show employment rising.

They traded questions on the issue of unemployment for a while, Harman noting that higher levels of unemployment means increased benefit payments and less revenue from income tax. Cameron’s responses were fairly repetitive; small number of public sector job cuts offset by jobs created in private sector; OBR independence and quoting Darling on inevitability of public sector job cuts prior to the election.

HH had a few good lines, in particular noting that Cameron always does an awful job of avoiding a question (on 1.3 million public sector cuts) by asking her one of his own, and she stuck the boot in to the Lib Dems once more when remarking that “no one that voted for them, voted for this”. Dave at one point got quite sarcastic and insisted HH actually look at the figures before she come to PMQs and ask him about them – HH retorted instantly by saying she’d look at them all if he’d actually get around to publishing them (in reference to treasury’s apparent ‘cover up’ of public sector unemployment data).

Cameron got a few good shots in, especially when repeating Labour’s failure to properly outline where they would exactly make their £50 billion of cuts. He also landed a knockout blow when detailing some of the wasteful expenditure of the Labour administration, in particular 2.4 million invested by Harman’s department on “two-storey peace pods”… which I think provided a “place of quality” for staff to “think and reflect”…and “restore the natural ebb and flow”. The raucous laughter that ensued made clear that the prime minister had made his point.

I think Cameron was on relatively good form throughout today, although he does very little to disguise his feelings of contempt and acrimony towards the opposition bench, and frankly it looks really very poor.

One final note on HH vs DC – last week at the Progress/Fabian event a panel of experts discussed the Labour response to the budget. Rachel Reeves MP and Kitty Ussher of Demos both noted that the OBR’s comparisons of Labour’s proposed budget to the Conservative budget showed better rates of GDP growth under Labour than the Conservatives (projections of 2.6 per cent vs 2.3 per cent respectively). Given that Cameron kept bashing HH with OBR figures today and waxing lyrical about its independence, she’d have done worse than remind him about those GDP figures. The trade off today between HH as the protector of public sector jobs versus Cameron positioning himself as the archangel of the private sector goes someway once more towards highlighting the constraints that Conservative ideology place on their economic policy.

Best backbencher

SK: My vote for backbencher went to John Cryer, newly re-elected, for backing up Harriet on the economy. Congratulations John. It’s great to see you back, and speaking up on the right subject – and completely on message for the leader!

CP: I’m going to go for Graham Jones, the new MP for Hyndburn, who asked a question right at the end, on public spending cuts in his constituency. I know that in the last 13 years Hyndburn has become a far better place to live, but many parts of it are desperately poor and well done to Graham for highlighting how the budget is going to adversely affect his constituents. Real representation at work there.

RC: Labour Cooperative MP for Sheffield Heeley Meg Munn asked a great question about Sheffield Forgemasters and Cameron did a fairly pathetic job of answering, responding with a line about the Royal Mail. Interestingly when the camera panned back to Munn after the PM’s answer, she was going apoplectic over his fairly obvious disregard for her question. Once PMQs had finished Bercow came back to her for a further point of order – seems she really had the bit between her teeth today.

Kate Green asked Cameron why he didn’t think losing 4,000 workers from JobCentre Plus was a false economy – DC reiterated his lines from exchanges earlier with HH about employment rising in the private sector, and public sector cuts being unavoidable under either Labour or Conservative government.

Best question, comment or joke

CP: This might be a bit leftfield considering he didn’t speak, but I’m going to go for George Osborne. Cheering and jeering don’t look great in PMQs, but I’ve never seen that before. He looked like a basking shark after too much sugar, whilst making a noise reminiscent of an injured Pokemon. At first it was vuvuzela-like but by the end of the half hour, I didn’t want him to stop.

RC: Best comment of the day was anything that came from John Bercow. The Speaker first shot down Conservative Dover MP Charlie Elphicke as he started on David Miliband’s leadership effort – Bercow cut him off, remarked that his question was irrelevant and swiftly moved on. He reserved his biggest shot for the home ecretary though – last week it became apparent that the press had got hold of a home office statement before the home secretary had made it in the house. Bercow investigated and called the leak “discourteous to the house”. May’s response however was pretty robust, and her unreserved apology seemed sufficient to lay the matter to rest.

Sally Keeble is a former MP and government minister, Conor Pope is a Labour blogger as is Rob Chesworth

Photo: UK Parliament