Corbyn and May fail to land punches in PMQs bar brawl

Same as it ever was. After two weeks in which he had cruised to easy victories at prime minister’s questions simply by standing up and asking: “How’s Brexit going?” – something to which Theresa May has no convincing answer – Jeremy Corbyn instead went back to plan A.

In hindsight, he may regret passing up the opportunity to complete his hat-trick with another tap in, as the session soon resembled two drunks fighting outside a pub who were too pissed to lay a glove on one another.

The Labour leader began with a straightforward question on the NHS, a subject Corbyn considers home turf. In 2010, £4bn of services had been outsourced to the private sector: what was the current figure? True to form, May didn’t have a clue and answered a completely different question. This is becoming such a habit, it can’t be long before someone suggests she get a hearing test. If she can get one, that is, as most audiology services have already been severely cut.

To help her out, Corbyn answered his own question. £9bn of NHS services had been outsourced. May put her fingers in her ears and shouted: “La, La, La.” A couple of her backbenchers looked slightly bemused, but most didn’t bat an eyelid. This kind of behaviour has now become the new normal. There is no reality you don’t like that now can’t not be ignored. It’s just a matter of will. Or blind stupidity.

“WALES,” yelled the prime minister when the Labour leader asked her about a National Audit Office report that had found private contractors put patients’ health at risk. Much like Ken Livingstone, who feels obliged to shout “Hitler” whenever a microphone is put in front of him, May has developed her own particular verbal tics. Whenever she is asked a question about the NHS she gets panicky and blurts out: “Wales.” She must have a thing about countries; ask her about the economy and her default setting is to shout: “Venezuela.”

Had he been a bit sharper, Corbyn might have spotted that Jeremy Hunt and Philip Hammond were looking distinctly twitchy on the front benches opposite. The health secretary and the chancellor are locked in a metrosexual arm-wrestling contest over the NHS budget and now would have been as good a time as any for the Labour leader to exploit the divisions in the cabinet. Instead Corbyn chose to engage in a handbags at dawn slanging match about who cared most about the NHS.

“I really, really, love the NHS,” said Corbyn, spilling his drink.

“No, I really, really love the NHS,” May slurred, her arms windmilling wildly.

“You really, really hate the NHS.”

“Well you want to overthrow capitalism.”

Democracy at its finest.

After a brief embarrassed pause during which no one quite knew where to look, Conservative Steve Double broke the silence by asking the most ridiculous question he could think of. Would the prime minister make Cornwall the centre of the UK’s space programme? Given that most of Cornwall struggles to find an internet connection this sounded like a long shot, but the prime minister was insistent that within a decade the UK would launch a rocket from Penzance and take over the entire galaxy.

As the prime minister had set up two sub-subcommittees to investigate two solutions to the Irish border – both of which she knew to be unworkable – was it not the truth she didn’t really have a clue what she was doing?

“No,” May lied. Doing something that was fundamentally pointless was exactly what the country had voted for in the referendum. Especially now she knew the Brexiters preferred unworkable “max fac” option, which she would inevitably support as she always did the opposite of what she wanted, was predicted to cost the UK £20bn per year. Take back control. But not of herself.

Emboldened by the prime minister’s obvious mastery of the subject, Tory Peter Bone took a leaf out of Corbyn’s old playbook to enquire how Brexit was going. Never better, she insisted. It would have been kinder for one of her minders to pressing the control-alt-delete keys and crash her systems in the hope of getting a sensible answer when she rebooted.