Political column - September 6

Some hope. Same old faces and boring Brexit yet again. And this is just the start of the term.

Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are not even speaking their own lines. At a dreary Prime Minister's Questions Mr Corbyn invoked the words of various Tory cabinet ministers, the NFU, the TUC, and a former governor of the Bank of England, to name but a few.

The theme was that we are heading towards a damaging no deal and it's the government wot's to blame.

Mrs May picked up the script of the director of the World Trade Organisation – you know the one, about a no deal not being a walk in the park, but not being the end of the world either.

There was sustained heckling from the Opposition benches on this. They think it would be the end of the world.

It was only a matter of time before her dancing skills would be mentioned and we didn't have to wait long.

"She can't keep dancing around all the issues," said Mr Corbyn. There was a lot of sustained laughing among MPs at that, so it must have been quite funny.

Under pressure, Mrs May has a couple of standbys. Here's one: "We will not have a second referendum. He should stand up and rule out a second referendum."

Mr Corbyn: "A majority of people might have voted to leave, but they expected the negotiations to be handled competently, but they certainly are not."

Then there's the other which, unusually for a Tory Prime Minister, is the race card: "He should apologise for saying Jewish people who have lived in this country their whole lives do not understand English irony" and "He is trying to change his party so anti-Semites can call the creation of Israel racist. He should be ashamed of himself."

Mr Corbyn: "There's no place for racism in any form in our society. On that we are all agreed. We should tackle it wherever it arises in our own parties, and that includes the Conservative Party."

After the tiresome knockabout stuff came a complete change of tone with the Prime Minister's statement about the naming of two suspects in the Salisbury chemical attack.

We were right, she said. Russia did it. The suspects were officers from the Russian military intelligence service – the GRU – and the attack was almost certainly approved at a senior level within the Russian state.

In reply Jeremy Corbyn, whose initial Parliamentary response to the attack was not his finest hour, trod carefully through a minefield. The attack was an "outrage" and "beyond reckless," he said.

Nevertheless Boris Johnson accused him of using "somewhat weasely language."