Nothing ‘inappropriate’? Was that a ‘gotcha’ moment?

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

The Prime Minister looked fired up as he stood to give his latest statement on phone hacking. Red faced. Furious. Possibly jet-lagged. Welcome to the PMQs that wasn’t – and angry Cameron was back.

He took a while to get going, but by the time the questions came round he was Flashman personified. To the left of him the chancellor looked unwell. To the right of him the Deputy PM was staring into the distance, obviously thinking about his upcoming holidays. Only Cameron had the vigour, the rest of his front bench looked exhausted.

The statement itself was a classic case of deflection. Cameron reeled off a list of issues that he evidently considers more important than phone hacking. Numerous Tory MPs stood up one by one to echo this point. “Nothing to see here, let’s focus on other issues”, they seemed to be saying.

It sounded like the old Gordon Brown mantra “getting on with the job” that the former PM would repeat when under pressure. Similar attempts at deflection were placed at the end of the statement, as Cameron tried to throw a landmine into Miliband’s path, appealing for an end to partisanship.

The Labour leader continued with his pre-planned line or partisan enquiry regardless. The PM is getting jittery over Coulson (and all but disowned his friend today) – Miliband would have been mad not to make Cameron’s judgement the focus of today’s events. Yet if Miliband was partisan, then Cameron and his backbenchers were surely more so. Any mention of Coulson was met with Gordon Brown/Damian McBride/Alastair Campbell/Tom Baldwin [delete as appropriate], which did make their pious calls for a post-partisan response seem a little calculated, and false.

And yet it wasn’t the Labour leader who put Cameron under the most pressure today (or at least not directly). Follow up questions to the PM’s statements from Tom Watson – and a Denis Skinner scud missle hurled at the Tory leader – sent genuine shock waves through the house.

Cameron had claimed that he wasn’t warned directly about any accusations against Coulson. Watson pointed to a letter he had written to the PM back in October, to which he’d received no response. Cameron was on the back foot. He was then pummelled (seven times? more?) by Labour backbenchers, most notably by Denis Skinner. The “beast of Bolsover” pressed Cameron to confirm or deny whether he’d ever discussed BSkyB with James Murdoch or Rebekah Brooks. He said that he hadn’t had any “inappropriate” conversations.

That sent a ripple of interest through the Labour benches. That certainly wasn’t a denial that such conversations have taken place. It was a carefully-phrased (almost Clinton-esque) response that asked more questions than it answered. No doubt Cameron will try to write off such assertions as “conspiracy theories” as he did with much else today. Yet many will now wonder what, if any, conversations Cameron has had that he deems “not inappropriate” over BSkyB. If there were any, should their propriety not be probed?

Over two hours of gruelling questioning (and counting) – surely the toughest day of Cameron’s Preimership so far – that felt like the decisive exchange.

Despite his best efforts, buckets of bravado, and a strong, fighters performance, it’s not hard to see Cameron’s answer to Skinner’s question prolonging this saga, and bringing it closer to Cameron himself. Or perhaps, to echo the Prime Minister’s own words from later in the debate, there was a sense of “gotcha”.