Who won?
Something of a score draw. Miliband drew up his battleline for tomorrow’s elections, pushing the ‘broken promises’ line, and citing police numbers and tuition fees specifically. It was clever of Miliband to have to hand the answer to the number of forcible police retirements for when Cameron, as usual, was unable to answer the question. He also nicely trotted out the line about the PM’s promise to send his ministers packing if they proposed frontline cuts. The bout became something of an outquoting-each-other-fest, as the Cameron dredged up a line of Miliband’s from an interview about taking responsibility for the actions of the last government, and another from an older interview with Alan Johnson on police numbers.
Best backbencher
Any Tory MP who didn’t follow today’s question template of ‘My local Tory council, Funburyton parish council, are making back-office savings by buying pencil sharpeners jointly with Bunburyton shire council, unlike nasty neighbouring Labour-run Smoggleton metropolitan authority which is taking it out on its powerless residents for daring to vote Labour last year by wilfully closing children’s centres’. And so on, ad nauseum, throughout the half-hour.
Best question, answer, comment or joke
Speaker Bercow seems to have had limited success over the last couple of years with his weekly exhortations for ‘members to calm down’ because ‘the public don’t like all the noise’. Perhaps he’s now moved on to gentle humiliation as he chastised minister for children Sarah Teather for behaving like, well, a child in all the excitement.