Speaker John Bercow is apparently a 'stupid sanctimonious dwarf', well at least according to Health Minister Simon Burns.
Whereas Brown would shrivel up like a porcupine, let his chin wobble and splutter 'no mr. speaker, no,' before bumbling through a response, Cameron seems unfazed by the Harman's attacks.
Last week Simon Hoggart put it best when he ridiculed Harman's line delivery in last weeks' budget response. He said of her performance:
Remember Eric Morecambe's funniest gag, as the police car rushes by with siren wailing? She would have said, 'Um, well, I have to inform the house that, frankly, sales of ice-cream will be unable to reach their full potential given the rate of travel manifested by the hon member,' and wondered why nobody laughed.
Cameron's defence to the 1m job losses in the public sector was that 2m private sector jobs would be created in the lifetime of the Parliament, which would be at a higher rate than that under the Blair-Brown boom years.
And her line of questioning seemed to follow the pattern of 'You're making rather a mess of cleaning up the mess we created.' Again, she attacked the Lib Dems, and when Clegg deputises for Cameron for the first time we will really see some sparks fly.
'Peaceniks to peacepods and bankrupted the country in the process' was Cameron's mocking put-down of Harman, who spent £2.4m doing up her own department, hardly essential spending in a time of belt-tightening is it?
'You can always tell when he doesn't want to answer a question, because he asks a question,' well Labour ministers were masters of doing that. Ministers invented a whole reem of tactics when faced with a question they did not want to answer. Peter Mandleson's response to a grilling by Jeremy Paxman is still my favourite. Lord Mandleson cries hysterically, 'Calm down Jeremy, calm down!' Again and again until he stops. Or even this one by Yvette Cooper on the 10p tax u-turn.
Prime Minister's Questions has almost nothing to do with reasoned political debate, rather it is the Leader of the Oppositions' chance to give the Prime Minister a black eye or two. All Harman does is screech at Cameron, taking the same line of questioning, and then chucking in a few one-liners that her interns have probably written up for her.
Surprising that she did not touch on Ken Clarke's shakeup of the prisons system, but Labour will probably have less to disagree with Cameron about than his own backbenchers will.
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