What a thoroughly dispiriting PMQs. First, from a narrow party perspective, Cameron failed to land the killer blow. Again. I am fast approaching the settled view that PMQs is simply not Cameron's best forum. In interviews and other settings he comes across as personable, articulate and intelligent. Definite leadership material. At PMQs somehow, that just never quite translates. Tory MPs will have left the chamber subdued and ruing a missed opportunity after that. More broadly, and importantly, today’s exchanges on the issue of NHS cuts throw the crisis of our politics into sharp relief.

The transparent dishonesty of what is parliament’s showpiece event is fast becoming a national disgrace and emblematic of everything that is wrong with our way of doing politics. Deceit, deception and fraud are at the very heart of it. On one hand the Tories, frightened of their own shadows, furiously back peddling from Andrew Lansley’s gaff. On the other, Labour - after all that we know, in the face of all the evidence - maintaining the fiction that the budget can be returned to balance without tax rises or spending cuts. The absurdity, the impossibility, the self-serving duplicity of it all, but also the cynicism and the contemptuous disregard for a public that can see through it only too well. This is both the root of the disconnect between parliament and people and the cause of the crisis at the heart of our democracy.

Crucially, though – and this is a point that gets all too easily glossed over - this absurd charade, this ludicrous deception, this blatant fraud depends upon a compliant media to uphold and sustain it. If the media were to break out of their obsession with froth, demonstrate some seriousness of purpose and actually hold our representatives to account, we might get a different politics. Politicians say the things they do because they know they can get away with it. They know the media will not hold them to account for it and so they dissemble. They obfuscate and embellish. And when this inevitably shades into outright lies and untruth, our entire political system is the worse for it. I have blogged about the crisis in journalism often and at length. It is time we started taking the argument seriously.