When David Cameron first faced Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs he eschewed attacks on the Labour leader. Rather than ridiculing his opponent, he cast himself as the respectful father of the nation. But at this week’s session, his patience ran out. From the start, accompanied by jeering Tory MPs, he brandished his contempt for Corbyn. “If he wants to know who’s heading for a winter crisis, I would say it’s the Labour Party,” he declared in reponse to a question on the NHS. “His media adviser is a Stalinist, his policy adviser is a Trotskyist, his economics adviser is a communist. If he’s trying to move the Labour Party to the left, I’d give him full Marx,” he added.
Corbyn had begun by again asking about tax credit cuts. “I asked him the same question six times last week … He’s had a week to think about it,” he quipped. Cameron replied that the government’s response to its recent Lords defeat would come in the Autumn Statement in three weeks’ time, and asked of Corbyn: “If we don’t reform welfare, how are we going to fund the police service? How are we going to fund the health service? How are we going to pay for the defence forces we’re talking about today?”
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