Death stalked prime minister’s questions today with serious illness and cancers the rather gloomy themes. Not that Ed Miliband asked about medical conditions once, though the entire Labour shadow frontbench was conspicuously wearing ribbons for World Aids Day this Sunday.
But there was a real epidemic sweeping the Conservative benches. Tory MP after Tory MP kept bringing up fatal diseases. Conservative George Freeman (Newmarket) started off with prostate cancer, then Richard Fuller (Bedford) asked about dementia; Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) wanted to highlight pancreatic cancer and Simon Kirby (Brighton Kempton) HIV and AIDs (he was tested last week). You couldn’t help wondering if these MPs did not consider serious disease a ‘safe’ subject. They certainly felt a little reluctant to ask about the economy though the prime minister assured us, in that out-of-touch way he has, that it was all fine and dandy.
Ed Miliband went on cost of living (again), and on controlling markets (again). This does end up with death but you have to wait …
The cost of living is a fruitful vein and one David Cameron is still not wildly comfortable with. Miliband kicked off with payday loans. Why, he asked, had the prime minister gone from believing only ‘two short months ago’ that ‘intervening in broken markets is living “in a Marxist universe” to believing it is the solemn duty of government.’
The prime minister retorted that Labour had done absolutely nothing about payday loans when they were in government and then got his first joke of the day in, referring almost completely out of context to Ed Miliband’s choice on Desert Island Discs of the Robbie Williams hit Angels. ‘He’s no longer a follower of Marx, he’s loving Engels instead.’
You’d have thought he would have better things to do than listening to him on the radio, retorted Miliband – like spending time being the prime minister.
There were a couple of exchanges where Cameron accused Labour of doing nothing about the problem when they were in power. It is an argument wearing a bit thin, especially as Miliband pointed out the Tories over the last few years had repeatedly voted against caps on payday loans.
So, Miliband asked, why not control energy prices? And then the prime minister started wittering on about markets and switching providers. His position had collapsed intellectually, said Miliband.
This was where death came in. 31,000 people had died last year of cold and 10,000 as a result of cold homes, said Miliband. Cameron started listing the things they were doing to help pensioners. But he couldn’t help being clever about it. 31,000 died last year but when Miliband was energy secretary 36,500 died. It did look a bit unseemly to start arguing about how many people died of cold on whose watch.
Miliband sensibly brought the subject back to intellectual collapse. He quoted Zac Goldsmith’s tweet from a few days ago: ‘If the PM can casually drop something that was so central to his identity, he can drop anything.’ – tea room Tory chat #greencrap.
Careless tweets are promising to become a prominent feature of PMQs now.
This PMQs was less of a mudwrestle than last week. Cameron controlled himself more and took this column’s advice to have a woman MP sitting beside him.
Miliband kept to the high ground, and Team Labour, with Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) and George Mudie (Leeds East) leading the charge, asked follow-up questions on the cost of living, energy prices and those issues that really mean things to people on the doorstep.
The two surprises of the day were the speaker telling the Scottish National party MP Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) ‘You shouldn’t be yapping at the prime minister like an overexcited puppy. It’s unseemly. You can do a lot better if you tried’ – top marks to the speaker for keeping uppity Scot Nats in their place – and the revelation that the Spanish border police had opened a diplomatic bag while it was travelling between Gibraltar and Spain.
But these were echoes from far-off lands. Labour still looks ahead, and more united. The Tories either look discontented or out of touch.
Cameron will have to watch out that an epidemic does not strike out his backbenches at the next election.
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Sally Gimson is a journalist, a Labour councillor, and reviews PMQs on Progress. She tweets @SallyGimson