COMMONS CONFIDENTIAL

You could almost see the frustration bursting out over Gordon Brown like a rash.

Here he was facing David Cameron and armed with a whole series of put downs over the Tories’ recent wobbles over tax and spending, abandoned policies and a slide in the opinion polls.

But the dastardly opposition leader wasn’t giving him an opening. In fact Cameron was on the front foot over Brown’s alleged refusal to properly kit out our troops and, even better, Brown’s sudden conversion to AV voting.

Still, the Prime Minister pressed ahead and delivered his best-prepared line anyway.

“It’s eight minutes past 12,” he said, looking at his watch, “and I gather the current Conservative party policy …..”

It raised a good laugh, but you couldn’t help feeling this was part of a longer script that he wasn’t being allowed to read. And it all seemed to throw him.

Cameron, on the other hand, appeared to have found his stride again. His own backbenchers must have been fearing another Brown onslaught of the type that have flattened their leader of late.

But Cameron’s choice of subjects cheered them up no end.

Mrs Merton once famously asked Debbie McGee what it was that first attracted her to multi-millionaire Paul Daniels.

Cameron asked Brown what it was, weeks away from an election, that attracted him to a change in the voting system.

And, when the Prime Minister told him it was what voters wanted as party of the campaign to clean up politics, Cameron virtually burst out laughing. “It’s back to the bunker time. What a lot of rubbish,” he declared.

Brown had inherited his leadership without an election, bottled an earlier general election and was now trying to do deals over the next election, he said.

As if to prove the point, Gordon Brown then said nice things to Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg about his policy consistency.

A smattering of Labour backbenchers tossed Brown soft balls to allow him to get one or two of his prepared lines out, but they didn’t have the impact he might have hoped for.

Perhaps this will herald a return of the old grumpy Gordon who has gone missing of late.