PMQs Verdict: Half an hour of learning very little

I’m tempted to boil this whole write up of PMQs down to just a few sentences. If you’re in a hurry and don’t have time to read the whole thing (I won’t take offence), here’s PMQs in a single sentence:

Miliband asked questions about the NHS. Cameron gave answers about the economy. A few people mentioned white vans.

That’s about the size of it.

Writing more on what was a pretty uneventful and not especially educational half hour seems perhaps a little wasteful, but lets give it a go anyway.

Ed Miliband asked questions about the NHS. He does this a great deal at PMQs. We’re told that the NHS will be the centrepiece of the party’s general election campaign, and Miliband certainly has no intention of missing his weekly Wednesday opportunity to beat Cameron about the head with it. And to be fair, Cameron did today make a pretty major concession – that the NHS is “under pressure”. That’s not going to be something that Cameron (who has often wrapped himself in the NHS as proof of his modernising credentials) will have said lightly, or wanted to say at all.

It’s also a line that Labour will want to repeat in the weeks ahead. “PM admits NHS under pressure” confirms much of what the party has been saying of late.

But what was Cameron’s broader response? You’ve heard it all before. A stronger economy = a strong NHS. (Despite the NHS getting worse whilst the economy recovers – but no-one pulled him up on that). This is the way of things from now until May. Labour will talk about the NHS. Cameron will talk about the economy. Both will convince themselves that such a plan is good enough to win the election. Neither are likely to be entirely correct.

And what of the chatter about white vans – predictable after the last week of course. Well Tory Nadhim Zahawi made a speech masked as a question attacking Labour for sneering at working people. But Nadhim – who once famously made an expense claim of a heated equine nature – might want to consider what expensing the electricity for your stables is, if not sneering at the public. In response, Labour’s Jamie Reed said that when he saw a white van he only wondered whether it was his dad or his brother driving it. What an excellent answer – if only some of the front bench had managed to deliver such a line with such confidence in recent days…

Maybe we did learn something from this PMQs after all. That there’s talent on the Labour benches ready to be used in the long six months ahead.