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PMQs returns – with a spot of role reversal for Corbyn and the Maybot | John Crace

It was all most irregular. At the first prime minister’s questions of the new parliament, Jeremy Corbyn had asked serious and probing questions about the Grenfell Tower fire and the Maybot had more or less applied herself to answering them in intelligible sentences.

If not always with great conviction or logic. You can’t have everything. Her efforts to reassure the Labour leader that the government had indeed followed the coroner’s 2013 recommendation to encourage councils to retrofit sprinkler systems to all tower blocks were less than encouraging. No one has yet found any council that was sufficiently encouraged by the government’s encouragement to bother.

Corbyn then asked if part of the problem might not be that local authorities had failed to overhaul building regulations. Absolutely not, the Maybot replied unconvincingly. The regulations were just fine. It was their application that was the issue.

“The question is, why, in local authority area after local authority area, are materials being put up that appear not to comply with those building regulations?” she said. “Why is it that fire inspections and local authority inspections appear to have missed that essential issue?”

In her newly diminished state, the Maybot had generously – if foolishly – decided to swap roles and let Corbyn be prime minister for a few minutes. Corbyn couldn’t believe his luck and was only too happy to step up. The reason that nobody was bothering to implement any regulations was because of the cuts to local authorities and public services. Nobody had enough time or resources to do their jobs properly. The residents of Grenfell Tower had been victims of the government’s programme of austerity.

The Maybot was left to play catch up. It had been the Labour government of 2005 that had started relaxing building regulations and the Tories had only been carrying on where they had left off. Corbyn looked understandably confused. Just minutes earlier she had been saying there was nothing wrong with the building regulations and now she was blaming the building regulations. Still, he wasn’t that bothered. No one could ever accuse him of supporting anything Tony Blair had done.

Although the Tories were vociferous in their support for the Maybot – she might be irreparably damaged goods, but she was their irreparably damaged goods and they would remove her at a time of their convenience – there was a new edge to the questions from the Labour benches. In the last parliament, many Labour MPs merely seemed to be going through the motions at PMQs but now they have rediscovered their mojo. Their contributions were forensic and laced with mockery.

Ian Lucas thanked the Maybot for increasing his majority by choosing his constituency in which to do a U-turn over the dementia tax during the election. Would she like to take the opportunity to do something similar and reverse cuts to the police?

By now the Maybot’s systems were in full overload and her replies became ever more incoherent. These days she can only do controlled and in command for minutes at a time. There was nothing wrong with reducing funding to the police because she had given them loads more super powers. Guns that fired spider webs. Uniforms that changed to spandex in phone booths. Jet-powered cars that can jump traffic.

Sensing his leader might have been hacked, Tory Marcus Fysh tried to rescue her with a feeble gag about Venezuela – Corbyn was reported to have muttered: “What a complete wanker” – a sentiment widely shared on both sides of the chamber. But the Maybot was too far gone.

When Labour’s Angela Smith and Barry Sheerman asked how Brexit was coming along, she went back to her default faulty settings. Brexit was going just fine. It was all simple and straightforward. That the EU was openly laughing at us was a sign of just how well the negotiations were going. She had a plan. A plan so secret, no one but her knew it existed.

The session ended with her swooning over Nigel Dodds. At previous PMQs she had never given the DUP leader the time of day, but now she realised how badly she had misjudged him. How clever and handsome he was. She blew him a kiss and £1.5bn in used fivers.

Her operators wheeled her out of the chamber, thankful no one had asked her about the government’s policy on public sector pay. Now that really would have been a car crash. First everything had changed. Then nothing had changed. Apart from the bits that had changed. Which might not have changed after all.