THE words "wazzock" or "gimp" didn't cross the lips of either Blue Dave or Red Ed but in another round of bitter Commons exchanges that's exactly what they were thinking of each other; assuming they knew what the urban terms meant, of course.

We have popstar James Blunt to thank for airing the derogatory nouns, born from his spat with Labour MP Chris Bryant, who bemoaned how Britain could not have its culture dominated by the likes of the old Harrovian, ex-Sandhurst warbler.

Robert Jenrick, the Tory backbencher, decried Labour's economic illiteracy and insisted only the Tories could prevent the UK from returning "back to Bedlam" - a reference, apparently, to Mr Blunt's debut studio offering.

Flashman replied: "I caught some of that, though I may need to buy the album to get the rest of it. The point is a good one."

The point being: thanks to the Coalition, Britain is on the up.

Now, of course, Mr Miliband could not accept such a contention for a second; otherwise the General Election campaign would be over before it had started.

But on the day of yet more encouraging job figures, the chief comrade was increasingly beginning to look like Sisyphus, hauling the electoral boulder uphill, only to see it fall back down again.

Red Ed's contention was that, despite the jobs figures and the PM believing everything was "hunky dory", there was another relevant statistic: working families were still £1600 a year worse off because of tax rises and benefit cuts.

Declaring Dave had failed on the deficit, the Labour chief barked: "You don't notice what's going on because life is good for those at the top. Can you confirm while everyday people are worse off, executive earnings have gone up 21 per cent in the last year alone?"

The PM's response got his Tory chums rolling in the aisles: "You criticise me on the deficit; you're the man who couldn't even remember the deficit!"

But Flashman's defence on economic policy had been pre-penned, courtesy of Christine Lagarde in Washington DC.

Declaring the Labour chief had been "wrong about everything" on the UK economy, Dave quoted the IMF chief's glowing tribute to it, saying: "'Growth is improving, the deficit has been reduced, unemployment is going down; certainly from a global perspective this is exactly the sort of result we would like to see...'"

Expect to see Mme Lagarde's words in the Tory election manifesto.