The shadow of women hung over prime minister’s questions more than normal. Usually the Tories manage to shut women out of the debate and subjects that might remotely touch on the opposite sex are rarely mentioned.

Labour MP Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) was not going to let that happen today and kicked off proceedings asking about the 42 per cent increase in long-term unemployment among young women.

She linked it to David Cameron refusing to support ‘no more page 3’. Was that because, like his colleague from South Dorset, he still thought there should be ‘jobs for the girls?’

This was a spirited Labour start to PMQs. Richard Drax, the member of parliament for South Dorset, had horrified most right-minded people last week, including a female Daily Telegraph columnist, when it was revealed that he wrote to a constituent who was complaining about Page 3 girls: ‘While I understand that some people are offended at seeing naked breasts, this particular page is something of a national institution, providing the girls with a job and Sun readers with some light and harmless entertainment’.

Cameron is not good at these questions. He didn’t condemn Drax and he didn’t get drawn into the page 3 debate. All he did was spout generalities about the government’s supposed successes in increasing employment.

You can see why women up and down the country are abandoning the Conservative party. Indeed, apart from when they have to find a wife, it is often hard to believe the Tories in parliament notice women much.

Creasy’s question threw Cameron a bit and when Ed Miliband stood up to lots of cheers on the Labour side, he got dug in to MPs’ pay, which IPSA has recommended should rise by 11 per cent. As many families are facing a cost-of-living crisis, MPs should not be awarded pay rises many times above inflation, Miliband declared.

Cameron was forced to agree and tried to say this was only a suggestion from IPSA and he would deal with it. ‘I’m glad he agrees,’ said Miliband and then went for him: it’s an old trick and it works every time. He ‘urged’ Cameron to work cross-party. Cameron was forced to concede that he would.

He always sounds very ungracious when he does this, and Miliband had riled him. It set the tone for the rest of PMQs. Cameron was grumpy and off his stride.

And there was worse to come for Cameron. Miliband said that chancellor was wrong to say that living standards were rising because they weren’t.

Cameron tried to deflect it with a joke about ‘Red Ed and Redder Ed.’  It may have looked good on paper, but fell rather flat – and then Cameron conceded again. The Institute of Fiscal Studies, he said, had stated that we have had a ‘great big recession, the biggest recession in 100 years, it would be astonishing if household incomes hadn’t fallen and earnings hadn’t fallen.’

Miliband had him.

After that all Cameron’s cant about jobs and growth sounded gradgrind. His patronising put-downs don’t work either: ‘Some people are slow learners,’ is plain rude and ‘Oh deary me,’ is hardly worthy of a sixth form debate.

And the question hung in the air. All the economic recovery was not being felt by ordinary households and the chancellor had not been truthful about that last week.

Team Labour kept on with the questions. Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) asked about women again. Why had working women had seen their wages fall by £2,500? Dan Jarvis (Barnsley Central) had a go over the shambles of universal credit – and Dave Watts (St Helen’s North) asked about whether Cameron still had confidence in Iain Duncan Smith.

Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) highlighted the three-quarters of a million people who are receiving no benefits and left to starve because of job centre sanctions. ‘Is there no end to the brutality and nastiness of Tory Britain?’

And there is no end. But this week was a win for Ed and for Team Labour. They set the terms of the debate and showed up how unpleasant Cameron is.

And proof – if you have any doubt – that Cameron only thinks of women as wives came at the very end of the session. It was a joke. An attempt to bat away the criticism of the selfie of him, Barack Obama and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the prime minster of Denmark, which is adorning the front pages of today’s newspapers: ‘When a member of the Kinnock family asked me for a photo, I thought it only polite to say yes,’ he jeered, reminding us that the only thing he knows about Thorning-Schmidt is that she is married to Neil Kinnock’s son Stephen.

No wonder Tory women MPs are leaving at the next election in droves.

———————————————————

Sally Gimson is a journalist, a Labour councillor, and reviews PMQs on Progress. She tweets @SallyGimson