Pre-general election PMQ's: Waspi, waspish or was it just waffle?

Jeremy announced to MPs that he's had a letter from Maureen this week.

Why did the Tory backbenchers laugh? Do they know her?

"If I was you, I would listen to what Maureen has to say," Mr Corbyn chided them sternly.

Because, he informed them, Maureen wrote with a heavy heart.

Born in the 1950s, she had been "treated disgustingly" like other women who had worked all their lives and were having to wait until they were 66 for their pension.

"What can be done to help the Waspi women?" the Labour leader asked Theresa May, at the last Prime Minister's Questions before the election, in what was a predictably packed and rowdy Commons occasion.

If you don't know, Waspi stands for Women Against State Pension Inequality and is not to be confused with waspish, which is how Mrs May gets when men with beards and red ties stand in front of her and ask her pointed questions.

In response to Maureen's conundrum, the Prime Minister waffled, but what her answer amounted to was: Don't vote Labour.

They laughed at Maureen. But they didn't laugh at Sybil. She has written to Jeremy as well. And she's 88 and is scared of the thought of going into hospital because of waiting times, patients on trolleys in corridors, and so on.

"Isn't Sybil right to be frightened about the future of the National Health Service so long as this government remains in office?" said Mr Corbyn.

Mrs May said the NHS was treating more patients than ever, before reverting to her theme of the day, and no doubt the entire campaign, that this was only possible through a strong economy, and that was only possible through strong and stable leadership (not like Labour).

Mr Corbyn has been written to by other people too. Christopher has only had a one per cent pay rise in five years. Andrew is worried about housing for his children. Laura is a primary school teacher complaining about cuts in school funding.

The answer to all these things turns out to be (you guessed it), a strong and stable leadership, delivering a strong economy.

You may not be surprised to learn that Jeremy has his own take on what constitutes strong leadership.

It is "about standing up for the many, not the few. But when it comes to the Prime Minister and the Conservatives, they only look after the richest and not the rest. They're strong against the weak and weak against the strong".

Angus Robertson, the leader of the SNP at Westminster, hasn't been written to by anybody, or if he has, he didn't mention it. He simply asked the Prime Minister if she would give an unambiguous commitment to maintain the triple lock for state pensions.

He received an unambiguous bit of waffling about pensioners being better off under the Tories.

Mr Robertson drew his own conclusion from that.

Strangely, given that this is supposed to be a Brexit election, Brexit was not mentioned at all until Mrs May eventually raised the subject herself.

Vote for Mr Corbyn, she said, and you would get a coalition of chaos. Vote for her, and you would get . . . well, you should be getting an idea of her script now.