Some real desperate farce from the House this afternoon. Brown’s answers to Cameron were incredibly poor throughout – “I’m sure that sounded great in the bunker” Cameron said after one particularly otherworldly response. As a further indicator of the standard on the government side, planted questions enable the PM to mention the National Minimum Wage and football, and several involved waving the scary “before 1997” card.

A sneering question comes from a Tory backbencher about bullying in the workplace (vis, Number 10) referring to reports of  “a Whitehall official” throwing office equipment around. Gordon even manages to fluff the answer to this, with a brisk and grim-sounding “Any complaints will be dealt with in the usual manner”. And a Nokia duly flies across everyone’s mental imagery! Does he have a death wish? Opposition genuinely helpless with laughter for once. And oh no! Apparently Gordon Brown is “determined to help LDV”. Spare us!

Anyway, Nick Clegg broached a new subject today, education and youth. He was palpably enraged by the Brown’s big set-piece speech this week on education and children (yes, he made a speech, although you may have been distracted by the swastikas). This was Brown’s “big chance” to address the problems of a care system in crisis, Britain having the unhappiest children in the world, poor literacy rates etc.

The central announcement of this speech was straight out of The Thick Of It – setting up another route for parents to complain about a school’s standards alongside the existing ones. How was this tinkering going to fix the enormous problems attending the education system and the country’s youth, Clegg wanted to know?

Brown answered one demi-clause concerning literacy standards and sat down. He really didn’t get the question, did he?

“There comes a point when stubbornness is not leadership,” Clegg replied “It’s stupidity.” To the resulting roar from the Labour benches, he retorts, “At least I say it to his face!” Aha – overheard in the tea room, perhaps? This government has crimminalised and vilified young people, Clegg goes on, and abandoned a whole generation – and all the Prime Minister can do is make a vaccuous speech to save his political skin.

Incidentally, I haven’t checked but I think I’m right in saying Clegg hasn’t run education up at PMQs before. If we consider PMQs as a sort of thumbnail guide to the issues at the heart of a party’s public discourse, this is a significant new choice. Clegg’s PMQs thumbnails over the past year and a quarter have been the economy,  tax and the Gurkhas. The first and last named are now what you might call “under our belts” issues. Tax shouldn’t, but has, dropped from the public radar at the moment because too many people remain confused about the difference between cuts in the overall tax take and the act of redistributing the existing package.

So now, there’s space in the PMQs thumbnail gallery for young people and education, the platform we’re apparently going in to the next election on, and the build-up starts here. I’m encouraged, as I have been throughout, by the way Clegg talks about young people in prison, the care system and primary education in the same breath. This is the liberal way to look at it. An authoritarian would section off bits of that narrative and label it “crime”.

Apologies for the hiatus in the full publication of this post during wot time I was busy being distracted by a thing.