It’s dial M for mystery as Corbyn in dark over phone calls

IT is fair to say that Theresa May will never be compared to Bridget Jones.

On Tuesday we discovered the shock news that for Lent the vicar’s daughter is giving up ... crisps.

As an advertising slogan once put it … do me a quaver.

If Bridge was doing Lent she would pledge to forgo fags and Chardonnay for the full 40 days and have both within the first four hours.

But Mrs May did appear to echo Ms Jones’s theme tune at Prime Minister’s Questions.

At the start of the first film, drinking white wine in her pyjamas in her flat, she sings along to All By Myself on the radio.

Mrs May’s message to Jeremy Corbyn was that when she called his telephone “nobody’s home”.

Mr Corbyn had been berating the Tory leader for “sneaking out” an announcement about controversial changes to support for the disabled.

Mrs May hit back that her ministers had telephoned his shadow cabinet to tell them the news.

To cheers from her own side, she went on to say that no-one had rung back for a full four days.

Although this was later disputed, Mrs May was picking up on complaints from former members of the Labour frontbench about organisational incompetence within their own party.

Expect to see her return to that theme at future PMQs.

Mr Corbyn had started strongly in part because he had done what he notoriously (in a moment captured on camera in a fly-on-the-wall documentary) refused to do a year ago – mention the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith. He also managed to remind Mrs May about her famous “nasty party” label for her own side.

But Mrs May proved that when it came down to it she was the one less likely to be home alone because she had more friends, politically at least. She timed the first appearance of her party’s new MP, in a seat they took from Labour, straight after PMQs for maximum impact. The two women also posed for a series of photographs together.

Mr Corbyn, meanwhile, failed to mention the loss. Too much of a hot potato perhaps.