PMQs review: Questions surrounding Edward’s leadership remain unanswered

Jack Blackburn 1.20pm

The battlelines for this week’s PMQs were bizarre. In theory, it should have been a tough day for the Prime Minister, given the overall rise in unemployment which had been announced earlier.

However, he was up against a Leader of the Opposition who has spent most of the past month doing a Norma Desmond impression in order to defend his record: “I am big. It’s the party that’s got small.”

In short, Dave needed to mount a fierce defence of the Government’s employment policies and Edward needed to deliver a knockout performance.

So, Dave had combed the figures to find anything positive. And to be fair, he did. There was a decrease in long-term unemployment and the number of young people who had been out of work for more than 12 months was also down. With the endless lists of government initiatives designed to create more jobs, there was some ammunition for him to use. However, when the economic climate is grim, it should - I repeat, should - be very hard for the Prime Minister to win an exchange such as the one he was faced with today.

Enter Edward Miliband. As with last week, we saw the calmer Edward, trying to not be preachy, screechy and, crucially, not attempting humour.

However, Edward’s problems have not just been presentational. They have also been strategic, and the element which was highlighted today was his lack of policy detail. Generally, Edward selects figures that are bad for the Government and seems to expect them to carry him through.

Increasingly, although he is becoming steadier, Edward still sounds like a biased newsreader, relating all of the government’s woes to the House without having the guts to suggest any hard policy in the chamber. Very soon he will discover that saying that the government is wrong is not enough. We still have no idea what Edward would do about it.

That perennial issue aside, this session remained in the balance. The Prime Minister had a couple of lines up his sleeve and managed to land some punches, executing a sturdy defence. He was still vulnerable because the news remained poor at its heart, no matter how many little positives he drew out of it. Edward didn’t have the ability to exploit this weakness at all. The questions surrounding his leadership remain utterly unanswered.

Follow Jack on Twitter @BlackburnJA