Going Spare

David Cameron's Flashman routine each week at Prime Minister's Questions is the only thing even more embarrassing than the Whipped-up braying noises behind him from people who all come from such restricted social circles that they assume both types of behaviour to be perfectly normal and acceptable.

Both on Google and on Yemen, Jeremy Corbyn wiped the floor, as always, with the ranting, puce-faced boor, whom the population at large believes to have had sex with a dead pig.

But William Hague used to beat Tony Blair around the houses at PMQs, and a fat lot of good it ever did him.

Still, Cameron seemed genuinely hurt that the reaction to the mates' rates deal with Google was anything other than wild and universal applause.

These misjudgements are becoming increasingly common.

Cameron seems determined to keep mentioning the Falkland Islands, despite the national shrug of the shoulders on the whole subject. There has been the same attitude to Northern Ireland for decades.

Similar indifference greeted the Litvinenko Report, laced with a heavy dose of an active disbelief that was based on a refusal to credit one word that came out of the intelligence services. On anything. Ever. Watch out for that one in future. The Iraq War casts a very long shadow.

Half the electorate now agrees with Corbyn on Trident, on which there was no debate until he entered the Labour Leadership Election. The Commons vote on it is having to be rushed through before the country turns conclusively against the whole thing, as becomes more and more likely with each day that the matter is at last allowed to be discussed.

There is no suggestion that there is ever going to be a Commons vote on foxhunting, any relaxation of the ban on which would now be massively unpopular even among Conservative supporters, with an overall national figure of a whopping 85 per cent support for at least the current law.

And even the totemic Bedroom Tax now looks likely to go the way of the child tax credit cuts and the court fees, both of which were likewise proclaimed to be absolutely essential until the moment that they ceased to be so proclaimed.

In the meantime, the poor saps that the Government is putting up to defend the wretched thing are being required to say "spare room subsidy", as once their predecessors were required to say "Community Charge".