PMQs review: Miliband edges a stale contest

The Labour leader found his stride after declaring that Cameron was "a PR man who can't even do a relaunch".

The first PMQs of the year was a rather unenlightening affair, with both David Cameron and Ed Miliband falling back on their stock attack lines. Miliband accused Cameron of breaking his promises on the economy and the NHS, Cameron accused Miliband of having no plan to reduce the deficit or to reform welfare.

The revelation in today’s Telegraph that a government audit of coalition pledges was held back to prevent “difficult points” overshadowing “favourable coverage” of the coalition’s Mid-Term Review gave Miliband an easy way in. But the Labour leader initially struggled to draw blood. Rather than pinning Cameron down on detail (as he could have done over the Welfare Uprating Bill), Miliband’s questions allowed the Prime Minister to reiterate the coalition’s superficially impressive record: the deficit has been reduced by a quarter (but only at the cost of pushing the economy back into recession), immigration has been reduced by a quarter (another policy that has strangled growth) and a million new private sector jobs have been created (196,000 of which were simply reclassified from the public sector).

Cameron went on to perform his own “audit” of Miliband’s promises, declaring that he had failed to deliver on his commitments to offer a credible deficit reduction plan, “proper reform of welfare” and a new policy on tuition fees. It was cheap politics (Miliband has never promised this level of detail before 2015) but it roused the Tory backbenches. Miliband countered stongly, however, with his best line of the session: “he’s a PR man who can’t even do a relaunch.” He went on to declare that “the nasty party is back”, an attempt to capitalise at the unease among some Conservatives at George Osborne’s strivers/scroungers dividing line. Cameron replied that Miliband has “a shadow chancellor who he won’t back but can’t sack”, an attempt to stoke speculation about Ed Balls’s position after David Miliband’s bravura speech on the welfare bill, viewed by some as a job application for the shadow chancellorship.

The Prime Minister left one notable hostage to fortune in the session. In response to a question on fox hunting, Cameron replied: “I have never broken the law and the only little red pests I pursue are in this House.” That line is an invitation to every journalist in the country to identify occasions on which he may well have broken the law. As Cameron once conceded, “I did things when I was young that I shouldn’t have done.”