The PM presented his usual calm and confident front - but follicular turmoil and a ratty remark gave the game away
We Cameron-watchers know when he's rattled. What with the unemployment figures climbing faster than a pantomime beanstalk and another Falklands crisis looming, he has plenty to be rattled about.
But it is part of his performance, his schtick, to look as calm and confident as a WWE wrestler facing a two-year-old armed with a peashooter. So we have to look for what poker players call the tells – the little signs that reveal what's really going on.
Take the bald patch, which may well be affected by disturbances in his brain patterns. Agitation shakes the follicles, causing some to fall out and others to flap over to one side. The patch, which used to be the size and colour of a goujon of plaice from Marks & Spencer, has grown to a whole fish. A small fish, admittedly, but on Wednesday it stood out from his hair like Moby-Dick on a dusk-dark sea.
Then he gets personal. He was ratty to Dennis Skinner who, like Robespierre, is a sea-green incorruptible (or, in some people's view, a sea-green intolerable) who asked him, at the end of prime minister's questions, when he would be cross-examined at the Leveson inquiry. We deserved, said Skinner, to know why he had appointed "one of Murdoch's top lieutenants, Andy Coulson, to the heart of the British government".
The prime minister sounded thrilled to be asked. He would be delighted to speak to the inquiry, and would answer all their questions, he said. He then went on the say how pleasing it was to see Skinner on such good form. He often said to his children, he told us, "there is no need to go to the Natural History Museum to see a dinosaur – come to the House of Commons!"
The correct response to this is to grin, in a contemptuous sort of way, to show how little you care. Instead, Skinner glowered, waved his arms in disgust and gazed angrily round at his colleagues. Many of them went on to Twitter, affecting to believe that Cameron was being "ageist" because Skinner turns 80 next month (Cameron was three years old when Skinner entered the Commons).
In fact, it was a reference to his political views. And Skinner has never been as demure as a Jane Austen heroine when it comes to insulting people. "Paddy Pantsdown!" he yelled at Paddy Ashdown. When certain Tory frontbenchers speak, he makes cocaine-sniffing gestures. He has always been much better at dishing it out than taking it.
Still, most MPs on all sides regard him as an ornament to the place, one of the old traditions, like the Churchill statue and the cry of: "Who goes home?" Tossing a casual and not very amusing jibe at this harmless old gent looked pointless and petty, the equivalent of ringing his doorbell and running away.
If the prime minister does go to the Leveson inquiry and answers all the questions, he will have done better than he did on Wednesday. Ed Miliband (who, again, rose to huge cheers from his own side, and scarcely quieter cheers from the Tories) tried to pin him down on the unemployment figures. Cameron said gravely: "The government takes absolute responsibility for everything that happens in our economy, and I take responsibility for that." But not the blame. It might be the government's responsibility, but it isn't their fault.
And, of course, Labour does seem to be all over the place, apparently opposing the cuts, then supporting them, then seeming to oppose them again. The Labour frontbench resembles those Glenda Slagg-type columnists who believe with passion and certainty whatever they happen to believe that day.
So Cameron had an easy opportunity to be personal – "he is so incompetent that he cannot even do a U-turn properly" – and quoted a Labour thinktank that talked about a "vision and leadership vacuum". "A total adequate testimony to what stands opposite!" he said.
"To what stands opposite." What a bizarre, yet contemptuous, remark. As I say, we Cameron-watchers know it shows just how edgy he was.