It was the last prime minister’s questions of the year and there was no sign of festive cheer. David Cameron’s team had been using Christmas to think up cheap jibes. The best they could come up with is that it would be like ‘Silent Night’ for Labour members of parliament who would not be able to talk about employment, the deficit, their leader or immigration. The immigration point is a reference to a leaked Labour guide on how to deal with the United Kingdom Independence party. Cameron actually had a colour photocopy which he wielded at various times during the session.

Admittedly Ed Miliband also used Christmas as an opportunity for a poke at Cameron. It is a joke I have a horrible feeling he used last year, but that is the joy of the Christmas cracker. It was all fixed, Miliband said, for people on Cameron’s Christmas card list, but not for everyone else.

But there is something particularly childish about Cameron which demeans the office. What other prime minister has been caught describing an opposition leader in a debate as ‘a waste of space’? It was what Cameron did triumphantly today.

The cheapness of Cameron’s jibes is a barometer of how rattled he is feeling. The Tories do not like it that the Labour party and the BBC picked up on the Office for Budget Responsibility’s conclusions (for which there is even a chart in their latest report) that the figures in the autumn statement suggest public spending  in 2019-20 will fall to its lowest level for 80 years, to levels last seen in the 1930s.

Miliband knows it is a weak spot. Why, he asked, did the prime minister believe that the BBC and the OBR were in a conspiracy against the Conservative party?

Cameron said that in fact spending would be at the levels of 2002 when there was a Labour government. In 2002, he added Miliband was a Treasury adviser.

Miliband was not to be put off: it was going to be a choice at the next election between the ‘1930s vision’ of the Tory party and Labour which would cut the deficit gradually. Cameron said something about the cuts meaning they would create a surplus. They were mending the roof when the sun shined.

But Cameron would not answer the practical question of where the money would come from for the £7bn tax cuts he was proposing. He would also not say whether he was raising VAT to pay for them.

Questions from Labour MPs were downbeat. Tessa Jowell (Dulwich and West Norwood) pushed her campaign about high transaction charges on money sent by people in the United Kingdo to their families in third world countries. It met with a fairly favourable response  from Cameron. Nick Brown (Newcastle Upon Tyne East) asked who the candidates for the next round of welfare cuts were. Answer came there none.

Derek Twigg (Halton) told the awful story of a 78-year-old constituent of his who had to wait bleeding on her kitchen floor for an hour and a half before an ambulance turned up. The story produced a torrent of statistics from the prime minister. Nia Griffith (Llanelli) asked whether Cameron was going to have a Christmas card with husky dogs on it – and did he think that the ‘groundbreaking’ Climate Change Act should be scrapped? Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) had a question about equality and the evidence that more equal societies grew faster. His Scottish accent seemed to throw Cameron, and the prime minister’s response was correspondingly patronising: ‘I was just about getting the hang of it [the question].’

Bringing Britain back to the 1930s is a good attack line for Miliband. He just has to convince the electorate of what that really means.

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Sally Gimson is a journalist and Labour councillor in the London borough of Camden. She tweets @SallyGimson