“The Most Annoying Person in Modern Politics”

David Cameron’s loss of temper with Ed Balls, who was barracking him at Prime Minister’s Questions, instantly turned an unmemorable session into one that will enter the folklore.

On the substance of the clash between the principals, I thought Ed Miliband got the better of the Prime Minister on tuition fees, but lost on police numbers. It is extraordinary that Cameron has not decided a line to take on what is for him the presentational disaster of all but two universities that have announced fee levels opting for the £9,000-a-year maximum. I speculated recently that the Government would change the policy and say that, as nearly everyone was opting for the maximum, it would be brought down to, say, £7,500. But today Cameron simply fumbled on.

On police numbers, Miliband did well in accepting that Labour would have made cuts to police spending, of 12 per cent rather than 20 per cent. But Cameron trumped him by suggesting that the difference was accounted for by a pay freeze and reform of allowances that Labour opposes. It is unlikely that this could be worth as much as eight percentage points on the police bill, but it allowed him to say that there was no reason why any police service should reduce frontline numbers.

Then came the Ed Balls clash (Guido Fawkes has put the clip up here). “I wish the shadow chancellor would occasionally shut up and listen to the answer,” said Cameron, in the middle of answering another MP. He said that the shadow chancellor was “the most annoying person in modern politics”, at which the Labour benches erupted with classroom glee at having got a rise out of teacher, before finishing with: “I’ve got a feeling the Leader of the Opposition will one day agree with me.”

I can see why James Forsyth thinks this reflects badly on Cameron, and in a just world it would. The Prime Minister showed weakness, discourtesy and petulance. But I suspect that in the wider world and in the longer term this will do him no harm, and that it will, on balance, strengthen Balls’s reputation, but in a negative way.

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