PMQs Verdict: The “Downing Street Dunce” can’t explain away the Royal Mail Sale Fail

Say what you like about David Cameron – and I do, as do his backbenchers – but he’s usually pretty well prepared for the weekly PMQs session. Inevitably in any week there are unexploded land mines and booby traps strewn across the media and political landscape. The plan is to know where they are and guard yourself against them as best as possible. That’s usually what Cameron does.

Maybe Cameron didn’t see the NAO report yesterday that showed the government threw away a billion pounds worth of taxpayers money with their botched sale of the Royal Mail? Or maybe this was a landline so big Cameron knew he had to dash across it and hope it didn’t blow. But it did, and Cameron simply didn’t have the answers.

Miliband, however, had the questions. For a Labour leader widely perceived to be under fire, he attacked the dispatch box with vigour today – as he did last week – even going as far as methodically thumping the wood with his fist to drum home a point after one obfuscation too many from the PM.

And what obfuscations they were. Cameron crowed that the Royal Mail is now profitable, but ignored that the Royal Mail was turning over a healthy profit before his government sold it off to the less than highest bidder. Thus far, the profitability or otherwise of Royal Mail appear to be linked as intrinsically as a rocking chair and a duckpond.

And it wasn’t long before the old tropes were back either. You can always tell when Cameron is struggling as he desperately shoehorns in the “clever” lines that he’s prepared beforehand, regardless of whether they make any sense in the context they’re delivered. There was the usual “Gah, the unions, ah!”. There was a torturous joke about Arnie Graf (reached for as a PMQs closer from nowhere, and even a distinctly unparliamentary reference to Miliband and Balls as “muppets”.

It was all a bit disjointed – like in the TV show Family Guy, the jokes seem to have little to do with the plot. Except unlike Family Guy, this crass and clumsy straight-to-DVD release of a performance won’t be getting rave reviews that will see audiences clamouring for a comeback.

The coup de grace from David the Unready was a claim – presumably pre-planned – that Labour committed to privatising the Royal Mail in their 2010 manifesto. The line was tossed in at the end, so that Miliband could not respond. It was as cowardly as it was untrue – Labour’s manifesto had actually pledged to keep the Royal Mail in public control. Sure, privatisation plans had been mooted by Labour before, but they never went anywhere, and certainly never cost the taxpayer a billion in a cheap and not-so-cheerful sell-off.

And yet most galling of all, Cameron sees no failing in what his government did to the Royal Mail. To him, selling state assets on the cheap to their rich mates is a cause for “celebration”  – which says it all really. It was an ideological decision taken to strip the state of another common resource – a move that Labour might have stopped, admittedly – and one that has seen a transfer of assets and wealth from all of us to a tiny few of us. That, in a nutshell, is what Cameron was accused of today. Rather than refute it, he embraced it.

And what of Miliband? Derided as a muppet by Cameron he may have been, but the muppet gag fell flat for most. Hitting back, he said that Cameron wanted to be the “Wolf of Wall Street” with his haphazard sell-off, but instead he was the “Dunce of Downing Street”. It all sounded a bit naff to me, but the bar for political humour in Westminster is often low. It was still trending on Twitter almost an hour later. Miliband had struck something.

And faced with Cameron’s failure to deal in any way with the failures of his government, the Labour leader was able to claim a much needed and valuable win.