PMQS - the Verdict

We sometimes find it difficult to score the performance of each party leader after PMQs because, like opinion polls, you can never take one week in isolation.

This time my impression leaving the chamber was that Gordon Brown was unusually fluid and combative, and I was inclined to think he came out on top.

It is fairer perhaps to say that the prime minister is this week's most improved leader, because like Labour's poll ratings, he still has a long way to go.

David Cameron is by far the quicker of the two men, and this week he demonstrated it from the word go  with a put-down following a clumsy question from Labour backbencher Richard Burden that was cut off by the Speaker.

"It's a wonderful thing", the Tory leader said, "you don't have to finish a planted question to get a planted answer" after Brown, with head-down delivery, got in an early reference to shelving the 2p rise in fuel duty.

Cameron threaded together some of the government's recent ills to try and create a sense of a government in chaos, and he punished the prime minister over the mishandling of announcements over vehicle excise duty and tackling knife crime.

The two mistakes in question - Brown suggesting the majority of people would benefit from a new tax on polluting cars, and the home secretary telling Sky News that knife criminals could be forced to visit their victims in A&E - were only presentational slips, but they help provide the sense of a government trapped by persistent flack.

Brown's response - that the Tories talk the talk on the environment but then oppose painful green taxes - is the seam he has been mining for weeks now, and it is when accusing the Opposition of lacking substance that he is at his strongest.

"The Conservatives said vote blue go green, but the minute they are challenged they walk away," he said.

Cameron continues to accuse the prime minister of being unable to be "straight with people", which seems a strange line to pursue - of all the negative things people think about the prime minister, of which there are apparently many, is this the one that readily springs to mind?

Brown dislikes the Liberal Democrats talking up the scale of the disaster facing the economy, with deputy leader Vince Cable last week warning of the worst housing crisis in history.

So Nick Clegg will have annoyed him by suggesting that rather than putting an end to boom and bust, Brown's famous claim as chancellor, he risked a "winter of discontent".

I was fascinated last week to hear the Guardian's David McKie say that Brown was once known for his amusing speeches. Perhaps it is a result of a decade in the Treasury, but it is hard to see even the faintest trace of that in his Commons performances.

Many of Cameron's jokes - "the message is vote blue get rid of this useless prime minister" are pretty thin, but Brown's inability to respond at this weekly session adds to the sense this is a prime minister who cannot get off the back foot.