‘Another week with no ideas. Absolutely no ideas for this country and absolutely no plans.’ Either Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer could have hurled that insult across the chamber at Prime Minister’s Questions this week – or indeed any week. Once again, both leaders were arguing over who didn’t have a plan, with a few contemporaneous references thrown in here and there so that viewers tuning in could be confident they weren’t watching a re-run.

Starmer made an early reference to the latest unrest in the Conservative party – unrest that’s currently almost more ludicrous than the overall situation, given Simon Clarke remains the only MP marching up the hill to replace Sunak.

The Labour leader joked: ‘The more they slag him off behind his back, the louder they cheer in here.’ Tory MPs were cheering, but it was probably reasonably sincere this time as Clarke’s Daily Telegraph article has so far served to remind most of them how ridiculous a party heading into an election looks if it is discussing replacing its leader again.

The slanging match between the two leaders lasted all six questions, and had very little new information, bar the Prime Minister’s insistence that the free childcare hours, which are supposed to start for two-year-olds in England in eight weeks, will be working. Other than that, it was just a list of accusations from both leaders.

The chamber has become a lot more sweary of late

Starmer’s questions were a bit too rambling today, in part because he wasn’t really asking about anything specific. He was largely engaged in making the Tory party look laughable. He described the goings-on among Conservative MPs as a long episode of EastEnders. He also asked which minister had briefed the Times that the childcare policy was a ‘shitshow’ (the chamber has become a lot more sweary of late), accused the Conservatives of being the only party that had crashed the economy, and summarised their latest failings thus: ‘Making steelworkers redundant and failing to provide childcare is not a plan, Prime Minister, it is a farce.’

Sunak didn’t fare very well. He recycled some of his previous attacks about Starmer advising Hizb-ut-tahrir, and reminded the chamber once again that Starmer had campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn: something the Tories want to use in the election campaign as they think voters are still unimpressed by that.

Sunak also added in some new quotes from Labourites about the lack of direction under Starmer’s leadership. His repeated insistence that Starmer is the one without a plan doesn’t go down well with his party as even his loyal MPs couldn’t tell you what the Sunak plan is either. He was the one who levelled that claim about ‘another week with no ideas’, and he repeatedly accused Starmer of having no plan, before telling the chamber that ‘his plans mean back to square one and higher taxes for the British people’.

The rest of the session had some stand-out questions including a rare one from Theresa May, who asked about the report she has just published on type 1 diabetes. The chamber moved from rowdiness to pin-drop silence when she stood up. There were also questions on Gaza, including a difficult one from Stephen Flynn about whether the IDF shooting and killing an unarmed man who was waving a white flag constituted a war crime. Sunak would only say that the government had said Israel should follow international law. Flynn’s riposte was that the government should be reacting with the same urgency to this news report as they did when ITV aired its Post Office drama. Remember the Post Office row? One other MP did, at least, telling the chamber that some of the victims were in the public gallery to watch today’s session.

But the political narrative has moved on, and those victims were presumably a bit confused that the topic that was obsessing so many MPs two weeks ago is now a mere backbench question at a PMQs where two men fought over very little.