Ed Miliband may be a genius bear with me on this one

Last week Labour unveiled proposals to improve Prime Minister’s Questions and generally clean politics up a bit.

What better way to draw attention to the current state of Prime Minister’s Questions than to engineer what was widely regarded as the worst session of the entire parliament?

It’s probably giving him too much credit to suggest this was Miliband’s masterplan last Wednesday.

But then again he’s a master of the Rubik’s cube and you need the same jumbled logic and lateral thinking to solve that as you do to figure out how Labour can get people to see past their gonk-a-like leader to the policies they are trying to promote.

Miliband quizzed Cameron about immigration, specifically the Tory promise to reduce it to the tens of thousands that has been utterly shredded as the latest figures showed the population increased by nearly 300,000 last year.

But the PM, who appeared to have jumped the gun 24 hours ahead of World Book Day and come to the Commons as his favourite literary character the dashing but wicked grown-up bully Flashman from George MacDonald Fraser’s funny series of novels chose to reel off a list of promises his Government has kept.

And it was a long list. Parties tend to generally make manifesto pledges they know they can keep. Miliband blustered in the face of the onslaught. The Tory benches erupted in actual thigh-slapping delight.

Unfortunately their laughter carried over to the next question which came from Barry Gardiner. Self-important Gardiner is generally worthy of contempt in the previous Labour administration, Gordon Brown gave him the purposefully puffed-up position of “special representative on forestry”, basically for a laugh.

However his question last week was on the deadly serious topic of cancer care and the chuckles that accompanied his list of relatives that had died due to the disease were discordant.

Labour want to improve Prime Minister’s Questions with a sin bin.

Under their plans, the Speaker would be able to order misbehaving members out of the chamber for the remainder of the session.

The only problem with that proposal is that if it’d applied last week there would have been no-one left in the Commons bar Miliband and Cameron. But at least then Ed would’ve got the head-to-head debate with the PM he craves.

He used some of his questions to pursue the PM on the issue of TV debates.

Cameron can be quoted at length extolling the virtues of a televised showdown and accusing the Labour leader of being scared. The trouble is that all those quotes come from 2009 and the Labour leader in question was Gordon Brown.

Things look different from the other side of the despatch box and now Cameron’s decided he’s less keen on the exposure.

The broadcasters say they are determined to go ahead with three debates two involving seven party leaders and a final face-off between the two candidates to be Prime Minister.

But that leaves Ed Miliband with the option of appearing opposite an empty chair something his team are against in case he still contrived to lose and the broadcasters don’t want because it would be boring or making desperate pleas to debate “anytime, anywhere”.

This is a slogan that’s been heard before and it dates back to the 1970s.

It accompanied Martini adverts and it was also the calling card of comedy trio The Goodies Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie.

Ed may have been trying to plant in the electorate’s mind the idea his team are the goodies as opposed to David Cameron’s baddies but there’s a danger voters will remember The Goodies as funny and hapless not Prime Ministerial virtues.