PMQs: To the untrained ear, it was political pointscoring over mass death

That there’s no one left by the end has become normal. This time there was no one there at the beginning

An all but empty chamber for PMQs this week, and who can blame them? (PA)

Prime Minister’s Questions doesn’t actually matter, so the conventional wisdom goes. Only weirdos watch it. Only proper weirdos read about it (no offence). But politicians care about it. The media care about it. They use it to inform their views on which leader, and which party, is best suited to run the country, and so its influence ripples out, its central importance to national life sustained.

So when even the people who are professionally compelled to take an interest in it have got better things to be doing with their Wednesday pre-lunchtime, it’s arguable you have a problem on your hands.

Swathes of bare green covered the Tory benches. Labour wasn’t much better. In recent weeks, when the Speaker has allowed the session to run to nearly an hour, it has been a common spectacle for MPs to slip out shortly before the end, in the manner of an emptying football stadium passing verdict on an embarrassing home defeat.

Here, they were empty from the start. Not so much a registering of protest as, a simple, “Sorry, not this week, I just can’t face it.”

And who can blame them? Jeremy Corbyn might have had a good week. Theresa May might have had a bad week. It might have been the other way round. It’s so hard to tell these days.

Jeremy Corbyn’s first question was on crime and police. If you choose to believe Jeremy Corbyn, violent crime is up, and police numbers are down. If you choose to believe Theresa May, crime is down and “police budgets are protected”.

All sound. No light. Believe whoever you like.

Then we were on to the matter of retrofitting sprinklers in council flats in the wake of Grenfell Tower. It was appalling that this hasn’t been done. But hang on, Theresa May had an answer, and reeled off to the Labour leader a list of Labour councils, Haringey, Lambeth and finally his own home of Islington, where they have decided, for a variety of sensible-sounding reasons, against retro-fitting sprinklers to council blocks, at least for the time being.

To the trained ear, this is what may become known as a “good answer”. Perhaps even a “devastating comeback”. To normal folk, however, the kind who can’t be bothered to listen to this kind of nonsense, what you’ve got is party political point-scoring over health and safety failings and mass death.

There was another gentle trot around the paddock of universal credit, the NHS, schools, tax avoidance, housing and all the other things that there won’t be the money to sort out in next week’s Budget, but which Jeremy Corbyn somehow has got the money to sort out. It builds, as ever, to Theresa May’s usual conclusion, which arrived with all the subtlety and surprise of fireworks at New Year’s Eve.

“The Conservatives are building a Britain fit for the future!” she bellowed to what would have been the collective bewilderment of anyone left listening. And if you believe that, well, same time next week.