Key points

Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn began by offering congratulations to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their impending marriage, and thanks to the police officers – in the public gallery – who apprehended the murderer of MP Jo Cox.

Corbyn turned next to Brexit, asking when the prime minister said she wanted as little friction as possible, was she talking about EU trade or the next cabinet meeting?

May said her policy was to leave the customs union, having as frictionless trade as possible, no hard border in Ireland and an independent trade policy. She said a shadow minister in the Lords had voted for a second referendum, and a shadow aid minister tweeted in favour of one. Would Corbyn rule it out?

The Labour leader said there had been no progress in cabinet for five months. May said some people wanted the UK to forget about having an independent trade policy. And some said: don’t worry about the Irish border. Neither of those positions was a position of the government. There will be a white paper, she said.

Corbyn said the PM’s own position was not supported by the cabinet, quoting Rolls-Royce, Ford and Vauxhall all warning about the future of trade. Michael Gove said this week there were question marks over the PM’s customs model. But at least he did not call it crazy, as Boris Johnson did. If May can’t persuade her cabinet, then how can she persuade the EU?

May’s retort was that Corbyn said there wouldn’t be a deal before December. But there was.

There are record numbers of people on zero-hour contracts, Corbyn went on, and record numbers of people in poverty. He said the Dutch have already started training new customs officers. How many HMRC extra staff have been recruited to deal with Brexit?

May said she wanted to correct him: almost two-thirds of the rise in employment has been from full-time work, and 70% of the rise in employment from 2010 has been from high-skilled work.

Corbyn pointed out he asked about extra HMRC staff. The Dutch government is better prepared. The government is not ready. If the government can’t negotiate a good deal, why won’t it step aside and make way for a party that will?

Snap verdict

Corbyn is starting to make it look easy. It isn’t easy, of course (winning PMQs is about the hardest task for an opposition leader), and Corbyn isn’t a natural as a parliamentary performer, but for the second week in a row, on a subject that for months he avoided at all costs, he managed to knock May all over the place.

He was also more versatile than usual, combining real humour (ie, a joke that actually made people laugh, not synthetic, parliamentary humour – the laughter after his first question went on so long they will probably have to edit it out in the radio bulletins), deadly specifics (the question about HMRC staff), good attack quotes (the ones from car manufacturers), but also questions that accurately and harshly summed up the government’s failings (primarily, the absence of a Brexit negotiating position only five months before the deal is supposed to be completed).

Tories who have been withering about Corbyn’s abilities should start asking themselves what it is about the government’s record that has made a Brexit PMQs such a doddle for him. May did her best to retaliate, but attacking Labour over the EU referendum sounded irrelevant and, even though she has a point about the contradictions in Labour’s Brexit policy, it is a second order issue compared with the problems with her own position.

Her claim that Labour said wrongly there would never be a deal before December is a standard bit of Downing Street spin but I’m not sure it has any basis in fact (I can’t recall anyone saying on the record there would be no December deal – only a few off-the-record comments about how it looked 50/50).

About the only life-raft left for May was to cling to the buoyant employment figures. But, with the growth rate looking dismal, as Corbyn pointed out, that wasn’t particularly effective either.



Memorable lines

Jeremy Corbyn’s opener:

When the prime minister wrote at the weekend that she wanted ‘as little friction as possible’, was she talking about EU trade or the next cabinet meeting?

Theresa May’s response to Corbyn’s claim of unreadiness: