Who won?

We saw a different style from both party leaders at PMQs today. For Ed Miliband, this was a more relaxed, less clearly rehearsed performance. Backbenchers will be relieved that he has taken so quickly to what is one of the most difficult jobs in politics.

From Cameron, the new style was a more conscious strategic choice. The serious tone that developed last week seemed to give the new Labour leader a gravitas that rattled Cameron. So today, he tried to undermine and belittle him. On another day, it might have worked, but on so serious a topic it felt somewhat overplayed.

On the substance, though, this was always going to be a difficult one for Miliband, interpreted through the lens of the spending review, but taking place before he knew what was in it. Overall, then, Cameron had it. Despite repeatedly failing to answer questions about the flexibility of the coalition’s deficit-reduction plans, he made no slip-up for Miliband to pounce on, and there were few hostages to fortune.

Best backbencher

Stephen Twigg, for asking the kind of serious question, of grave and personal importance to specific members of his constituency, that makes PMQs so important an institution. It was an issue on which the PM would never normally spend time – the rules and procedures for returning to the UK the bodies of UK citizens who have died abroad. And Twigg won his constituents a respectful response from the prime minister, and a promise to meet with them to discuss the issue.

Best question, comment or joke

Not many jokes today. But I enjoyed the speaker’s intervention to calm members after a Tory backbencher claimed even chairman Mao believed in deficit reduction, ‘leaving Labour in a minority of one’. Bercow’s intervention: ‘order, order, I should like to hear the prime minister’s view on Mao’.