PMQs: Who won? I'm not sure I even know who was there

We are about to enter the Hamlet-style bloodletting phase of Brexit. Corbyn does not want to fight, but to claim the kingdom at the end

Hardly anyone turned up for Prime Minister’s Questions this week and Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn’s performances are best understood as a tribute to them.

I’ve never seen the backbenches so empty. In the upper galleries, where guests of MPs sit, there was barely a soul. And who can blame them? Prime Minister’s Questions is the closest Westminster has to a TV format, and its role in at least trying to compel people to watch and therefore take an interest in politics is important. It’s meant to be a very straightforward case of champion versus challenger, the high point of the deliberately adversarial British system. But the format is broken.

The fault lines that divide do not run down the middle of the floor of the Commons. There are too ferocious civil wars being fought at once, over a question that is far bigger than Theresa May, far bigger than Jeremy Corbyn. Bigger, even, than Tory and Labour.

When Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May turn up to bat about the basics of Brexit, the feeling in the room is of being stood too near two inarticulate and frankly rather irritating strangers arguing in a pub.

“Because Theresa May didn’t mention the Chequers plan in her conference speech, or her Commons statement on Monday, does it mean the plan is now dead?” Jeremy Corbyn wanted to know. He received the correct and eminently foreseeable answer: no.

There were some indecipherable thoughts on frictionless trade and the car industry, the time-limited nature of the backstop agreement signed in December, before rising to his usual shouty peroration.

“They are too weak and too divided to protect people’s jobs, to protect our economy,” Corbyn said. Which is true – but it’s just not good enough.

“Labour can play politics but it’s the Conservatives that deliver for the people of this country,” May shouted back – which is as demonstrably untrue as almost anything that’s ever been said in that historic room. What the Conservatives have done is to gently remove the people of this country from a great global economic boom by outsourcing to them their own civil war on Europe.

The prime minister stands on the brink of catastrophic failure in some very important negotiations, and is in all likelihood a few months away from being taken out by her own party. But she knows her fight is not with Jeremy Corbyn, and Corbyn knows his fight is not really with her, either.

We are about to enter the wild Hamlet-style bloodletting phase of Brexit. As far as Jeremy Corbyn is concerned, the less Jeremy Corbyn has to do with it the better. He will be delighted to play the Fortinbras role.

We might hear his name a lot, this lurking threat, but he will not advance the action. He will hope only to sweep in at the end and claim the bloody kingdom for himself.