As he came under fire, the good ship Corbyn started taking on water

THERESA May must have been delighted. Jeremy Paxman’s muchvaunted interrogation with her proved in large part to be about immigration and Brexit.

For Mrs May that was like going into a scary A-level and finding your two best essay topics just came up in the exam.

No deal with the EU would be better than a bad deal, she said. Audience applause. She repeated the line. More audience applause. She was on home turf and it served her well.

The Sky News/Channel 4 debate show was a rather odd event. Jeremy Corbyn, batting first, tried to put across a lighthearted image (despite his horrible pro-IRA history).

Mrs May was stolid and serious, but more human than she sometimes can be.

Both contestants had wobbles. Mr Corbyn faced repeated probes about his views on terrorist groups. Mrs May had to endure a Paxo torrent when the veteran interviewer (perhaps frustrated that he was not getting much change from her) said EU leaders would think she was ‘a blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire’.

But by the end of the show there was only really one Prime Minister to be had from this contest, and her name was not Jeremy.

Mr Corbyn wanted us to see him as a jocular Father Christmas, deflecting Paxman with weak banter. It worked at first but soon the dreadful flimsiness of Mr Corbyn’s pitch to be prime minister was flapping around in the gale. There is only so far you can take bluster. Last night Mr Corbyn reached that point.

When Paxman got on to Mr Corbyn’s positions on the Queen (he dislikes the Monarchy), the Falklands war (‘a Tory plot’) and the killing of Osama bin Laden (‘a tragedy’), Corbyn started to flail. He kept looking at the ceiling.

Paxman noted that Mr Corbyn’s sidekick John McDonnell wanted to scrap MI5, Special Branch and disarm the police.

The studio audience clapped loudly – and the good ship

Corbyn started to take on water. Callum, from Northern Ireland, asked: ‘How can we trust you, Mr Corbyn, to stop terrorism?’

Corbyn wobbled his head and gulped. ‘I did make contact with Sinn Fein,’ he said slowly.

Callum interrupted to point out that Mr Corbyn had attended a commemoration of IRA thugs who had been plotting to murder police officers.

Really, that this man is seen as a benevolent old Steptoe is one of the most bizarre truth-warps of our time. And his habit of smiling, oh-so-reasonably, and burbling about his desire to see world peace? Oh, spare us.

If he were the decent patriot he claims to be, would he not be angered by these accusations that he mixed with known killers?

The programme suffered, as television debates always do, from its frenzied rush.

After the pre-match hyperbole about how important the event was, and the arrivals shots (giving the TV company chiefs their moment in the lights), the show itself whizzed by.

Earlier in the day, at a Tory event in Twickenham, I had asked a rather downbeat Mrs May if she was in danger of looking a bit of a glumbucket. She shot me the sort of dirty look Mrs Herod might once have used when she saw John the Baptist’s severed head being brought in on her best silverware.

BY the time of last night’s debate she had recovered her poise. She may never become a minter of memorable phrases but the audience treated her with a solid respect. She faced awkward queries about social care and school funding but survived.

When Mr Corbyn was up against Paxman, it was a weird mismatch, Corbyn not really on the same wavelength.

When Mrs May was in the hot seat, she engaged with Paxo and stuck firmly to her line that Brexit was going to happen and that she would walk away from the table if the EU played silly beggars.

Can we ever imagine Corbyn doing that?