With a ministerial statement on Orgreave tabled for later, Corbyn asked a question about ... Orgreave. Not just a waste of a question – that is par for the course – but a revelation of his true audience: the National Union of Miners, with fewer than a thousand members, is more important than the UK with its 65 million population in Jeremy's mind.

The choice for May was, bluntly, whether to be kind or cruel. Was she going to be a boxer holding up a dazed opponent, because in the long run Corbyn is the Tory party's best asset, or was this going to be a chance to show the country what she was made of? Our new PM took the latter path. She knows that most voters see only a couple of minutes of PMQs on the evening news or on their phones. She was straight in:

You refer to me as the second woman Prime Minister, in my years here in this House I've long heard the Labour Party asking what the Conservative Party does for women - well, just keep making us Prime Minister.

And she was on a roll. Corbyn asked about austerity. May came back:

He calls it austerity. I call it living within our means. He talks about austerity, but it is actually not about saddling our children and grandchildren with debt.

Finally, the question was asked what she would do when faced with an open goal. As it turns out, Mrs May would score and then run to the corner flag where she would be mobbed by her backbenchers. Corbyn talked about insecure employment. Of course, a more self-aware politician would have realised this could be used against him. Corbyn ignored that fact; May didn’t:

I am interested that he refers to the situation of some workers who might have some job insecurity and potentially unscrupulous bosses ... I suspect that there are many members on the Opposition benches who might be familiar with an unscrupulous boss. A boss who doesn't listen to his workers, a boss who requires some of his workers to double their workload and maybe a boss who exploits the rules to further his own career. Remind him of anybody?

Zing! And ouch!