PMQs verdict: Are you thinking what Dave’s thinking?

This was a PMQs of tortured sporting metaphors, so let’s get mine out of the way quickly. Ed Miliband had an open goal today. He didn’t score, nor did he slam his shot over the bar. Instead he trickled the ball back towards goalkeeper Cameron. The ball travelled so slowly Cameron was able to trap our metaphorical ball underfoot, pick it up and barge past a bemused Miliband en route to victory. Miliband lay sprawled on the floor, defeated, as Cameron kicked mud in his face. This is all still metaphorical by the way – the Commons may be unpleasant but it isn’t that bad…yet.

It was a PMQs that Miliband should have won, and after a string of PMQs victories for te Labour leader, it felt like his performance was flat. It was almost like he didn’t expect to lose. If there was complacency there then it must be absent next time.

How did Cameron win? A combination of his usual tactics with an added dollop of “nasty party” as a fetid garnish. His favoured tactic – answering questions which haven’t been asked – was deployed at length, but it was seasoned with the wilful conflation of legal immigration under Labour with lax border controls under the Tories. To listen to Cameron, every Polish worker who entered the country legally under Labour was equal to every undocumented illegal immigrant who swept past non-existent border security under the Tories. The inference was clear – ‘You let immigrants in…we let immigrants in…immigrants are bad…we’re all as bad as each other’, seemed to be the thrust of his response. It was a 2005 flashback. Are you thinking what Dave’s thinking? I certainly hope not.

The problem for Labour though – and the underlying reason why Ed lost today – is that we still don’t have a coherent position on immigration. We seem, as a party, to swing between extreme comfort with immigration to taking semi-sadistic pleasure out of ever stricter levels of immigration control. More often than not that means Labour says nothing that sounds interesting on immigration, unless we’re sounding wilfully opportunistic. And then of course there’s Maurice Glasman, whose words Cameron threw at Miliband today. Glasman’s always…interesting, but not always pointing in a direction that suggests political success.

It wasn’t all plain sailing for Cameron today. May isn’t out of trouble yet, and Bill Cash popped up to pointedly remind the PM how divided his party are. But there will have been only one leader today feeling pleased with himself, and that’s the one in No. 10.