Political column - February 8

Woman, man, woman, Jezza, woman, woman, man.

A score draw on the front benches. But Theresa May surely wins through her trump card. She actually is a woman. Jeremy Corbyn is not, and there's no spinning his way out of that one.

It's just not fair, but hey ho, gender politics is like that.

And she or her advisers got in a sneaky trick too. She sported a lapel ribbon in purple, white, and green, the colours of the suffragettes. Where was Jezza's? Heads will roll.

Mrs May reminded the Commons that this week marked the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote.

It is a statement which is not actually true as some Victorian women had the right to vote in some elections, but has been repeated so often that it has become a sort of truth by popular consent.

In any event, the Labour benches quibbled. Mrs May clarified that universal suffrage for women came 10 years later "under a Conservative government." Hearty cheers at that, although strangely none at all from the Labour benches.

At Prime Minister's Questions Mrs May and Mr Corbyn vied to prove that they were the ones with the greater credentials in supporting the suffragette cause.

Mr Corbyn: "We should understand our rights came from the activities of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to bring about democracy and justice within our society. And those women that suffered grievously being force-fed in Holloway Prison - in my constituency - and those that suffered so much, need to be remembered for all time."

So suffragettes were force-fed in Mr Corbyn's constituency? Wouldn't it be better for him to keep that quiet?

Mrs May could beat that: "I was very pleased yesterday to have an opportunity to meet Helen Pankhurst, the granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst. I myself heard about the fight by the suffragettes from my late godmother, whose mother was a suffragette and both of whose parents knew the Pankhursts."

This was merely the light starter. Mr Corbyn's main course was an attack on Mrs May's record on crime and policing both as Prime Minister and as Home Secretary.

With crime rising, did the Prime Minister regret cutting 21,000 police officers, he asked.

Now anyone who has followed the recent crime figures will know that depending on what figures you choose to refer to, crime is both going up, and going down.

Mrs May chose to believe the figures from the national crime survey which "shows that crime is now down at record low levels."

Mr Corbyn, on the other hand, liked the figures for recorded crime better. These showed that crime is up by one fifth since 2010, he said.

If they cannot even agree on the basic premise of whether crime is up or down, the chances that the two party leaders would agree on anything else about crime was nil, and so it proved.

Mrs May's pay-off was that a Labour government would bankrupt Britain which would mean that the police wouldn't have any money.

Mr Corbyn gave the NHS a miss this week, but the veteran Labour MP Dennis Skinner did not, being called by the Speaker amid best wishes for his forthcoming birthday.

"I didn't know about that. I don't celebrate things like that. I don't think you should celebrate age," grumped Mr Skinner.

Mr Skinner will be 86 on Sunday.

He said the period of 1997 to 2010 was a golden age of the NHS when the Labour government put in billions, and this government should do the same. Mrs May said it was all because the previous Conservative administration had left a "golden economic legacy."

Brexit didn't feature that much but in the earlier questions to the Northern Ireland Minister Shailesh Vara we heard a robust approach suggested to the current negotiations from Ian Paisley: "It's about time that the government demonstrated a No Surrender attitude to the EU eurocrats who try to bully us over air flights, passenger duty and everything else.

"Stand up to them man! Stand up to the EU and let's get on with leaving the EU!"

Labour's Jack Dromey called for the government to intervene in the prospective hostile takeover of GKN by Melrose, but got no clear answer either way.

Another MP wanted an assurance that trade talks with President Trump's America would not see the pillaging of the NHS by US companies.

"We will go into those negotiations to get the best possible deal for the United Kingdom," said Mrs May.

Mmm... haven't we heard that before somewhere?