PMQs: Orgy of opportunism

At Prime Minister’s Questions just now, Ed Miliband put David Cameron on the spot over reports in today’s papers that the Prime Minister has ordered a U-turn on shortening certain sentences. “Has he?” asked the opposition leader.

Cameron distinctly failed to answer the question (just as he failed, later in the session, to comply to a request by the speaker to withdraw a claim that Miliband had “misled the House”). By refusing explicitly to back the Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, who is trying to get prisons numbers down, Cameron effectively confirmed the reports. As well he might: last night in Westminster, Tory press officers were briefing that Cameron had given Clarke a dressing down in a one to one meeting in Number Ten.

But Miliband, who is still showing worrying signs of being on the wrong side of this argument, should not be too quick to make political capital out of such a U-turn. It was after all the Labour leader who wrongly—as I wrote here last month—put short-term party interest before the longer-term interests of the country by calling for Clarke to go over the rape furore which led to Cameron’s hasty re-think.

Meanwhile, a sensible approach to criminal justice fades away, overshadowed by the mutual opportunism of both the Tory and Labour leaders.