First up, apologies for PMQs lateness once again. The more Twittery among you will know that this is not (this time) due to my being an indolent wossname, but instead due to my having been listening to and commenting on it on BBC 5Live from the most charmingly antiquated studio room you can imagine in Guildford (or any other prosperous southern town; I prescribe no limits to your imagination in this regard).

Here’s a thing – so far as I can recall I’ve never listened to PMQs before, only watched it, and I found the whole business

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And so to our belated PMQs coverage, belated owing to my having decided to have a little snooze instead staff shortages due to the continuing adverse weather conditions.

Cameron began by toning his recent braying performances down considerably, and used two fairly calm and measured questions about protectionism to set up a telling point about the “British jobs for British workers” slogan. He correctly pointed out that it “encourages protectionist sentiment” even while Brown lectures the world on the “evils of protectionism” and zeroed in on Brown’s inability to apologise for misjudgements, including this one. But he can never resist being shrill for long. His last question ended “…and will he make a promise not to do it again?”, which just makes him sound ridiculous. The snarky schoolboy is never far away.

David Cameron is truly the hotel lobby pianist of parliament. Oily hair, smooth smile, same old bloody tune. Can’t you just see him in one of those awful little 1950s matinee jackets? Yes you can. All over the web, in fact. And at PMQs today, he went for the old will-he-admit-blah-blah-abolishing- boom-and-bust question again.

Of course, I should be fair and say that in some ways repetition of this message is a smart move (I just wouldn’t ever let such fair-mindedness stand in the way of a good caricature). Nick Clegg makes use of the repetition technique sometimes as well, after all. Cameron’s message does get to the heart of the hubris that is characteristic of both Brown and the government in general in terms of how they have behaved with the nation’s finances. However, it also gets to the heart of the fact that the Tories haven’t got the  first clue what to do about it except point and say “nerny-nerny-ner-ner”.