Anyone who thinks that women make more consensual politicians only had to watch shadow deputy prime minister Harriet Harman going for deputy prime minister Nick Clegg today in parliament to be disabused of the idea.

David Cameron is on an official visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories which is why the deputies were left in charge to fight it out at prime minister’s questions.  It’s always an uncomfortable position for Clegg as he has to defend government policy, and by goodness Harman was going to make him do that today.

She attacked first on Clause 119 of the care bill. The Liberal Democrats voted in favour of the amendment yesterday which would allow the health secretary to close hospitals without consulting local people at all.

‘They sold out to the Tories and the Tories got their way again. Is there any logic to how the Liberal Democrats vote other than self-interest!’ Harman declared. Clegg had no answer to this except to repeat the idea that Labour had signed ‘sweetheart deals’ over the health service.

At the Liberal Democrat conference, Harman went on, Liberal Democrat ministers were falling over themselves to criticise Tory colleagues and call policies ‘unfair, absurd and hated … His own party president says the bedroom tax is wrong, unnecessary and causing misery but they voted for it. Now they say they want to abolish it.’ What was the deputy prime minister’s view?

Clegg read straight from the Tory script: there were 1.7 million people on housing waiting list and 1.5 million spare bedrooms. They (the Tories and Liberal Democrats) were dealing with the mess inherited from Labour. The Conservative party press office triumphantly tweeted Clegg’s words out as he spoke them.

Harman stabbed again, accusing Clegg of staging phony wars with the Tories and then trotting through the lobbies with them.

‘They used to talk about two parties coming together in the national interest,’ said Harman. ‘Now they are two parties bound together in mutual terror of the electorate.’

Harman absolutely exposed the Liberal Democrats – saying one thing for public consumption and to their party faithful – and yet in practice backing the Tories all the way.

Labour MPs were on a roll now. The Liberal Democrats have just suffered a catastrophic defeat in a local council by-election in Clifton North in Nottingham, coming last AFTER the Bus Pass Elvis candidate.

Kevan Brennan (Cardiff West) asked: ‘Can the electorate’s message to him [the deputy prime minister] be summarised by the paraphrasing the words of the song by the real Elvis “You ain’t nothing but a lapdog”.’

Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) got in next wondering why the Bus Pass Elvis party beat the Liberal Democrats. Was it, she asked, because of the ‘bedroom tax, the trebling of tuition fees, the unfair cuts to the poorest families or the betrayal of the NHS’?

Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) talked about a scandal in his constituency where a woman had died because of failings at the Hollywell Medical Group which run surgeries across Derbyshire. He accused the deputy prime minister of being spineless and ‘capitulating to the Tories on the NHS.’

All Clegg could do was repeat his ‘sweetheart deal’ line and attack Perkins over his amendment to the deregulation bill, which Perkins tabled to make sure that apprenticeships by 2020 are at Level 3 rather than Level 2. That the Liberal Democrats attack Labour because they are standing up for high-quality apprenticeships should be no surprise at all now I suppose.

Clegg was absolutely holding the Tory line. In response to another question he repeated the untrue Cameron claim that there were more nurses employed now in the NHS.

There was a slightly leftfield question by Ian Lucas (Wrexham) about whether the Department for Work and Pensions was going to stop paying benefits on Post Office card accounts. Clegg said he knew nothing about this. Lucy Powell (Manchester Central) had a question on the huge rise in the cost of childcare. Clegg said childcare costs were going down in England – surely another figure from the Cameron and Clegg office of dodgy statistics.

Clegg would not even answer Heidi Alexander’s question about whether he would still vote to freeze NHS workers’ pay if the independent review body said they should go up.

This was a win for Harman against Clegg. He looked like a Tory stooge – lapdog, sorry – and he did not get much support from his own side either.

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Sally Gimson is a journalist, a Labour councillor, and reviews PMQs on Progress