COMMENT: Why are our MPs talking such rap?

Juvenile behaviour from politicians is nothing new but on Wednesday, from the top down, members of the House achieved new levels of childishness, writes Pete Cashmore.

In a week when they really ought to have had more pressing issues on their mind, the petty displays of disrespect rather stuck in the craw.

At times it was almost like watching a rap battle, as the warring factions laid into their opponents' dodgy dress sense, insulted their mothers and generally heckled like comedy club drunkards.

For those who don't know what rap battles are, they are quite the hip thing right now, spoken word bouts between two or more performers attempting to belittle each other using complex rhyme schemes.

However, performers can occasionally lapse into subject matter that might politely be described as 'route one'.

In other words they start insulting the opponent's mother (sample quip: "Okay, it's mum joke time / Your mum's got a tattoo of the Umbro sign").

Not their actual mother, rather the concept of the 'universal mum' – the thinking is that everybody loves their mum so nobody likes hearing their name brought up in a pejorative way.

It's a sure-fire way of getting your antagonist's back up.

And when senior politicians start dragging mothers into their trading of blows, I find myself asking: Do we want a PM, or Eminem?

It all started on the Labour side, who I'm sure have some rap fans among them, aiming a pretty low blow at David Cameron, with one wag raising his voice and suggesting that Cameron 'ask your mother' about the NHS, a reference to the fact that the PM's mother, Mary, had signed a petition opposing the very cuts to children's centres that the Conservatives seek to bring about.

Well, David wasn't going to take that. He fired back, "Ask my mother? I think I know what my mother would say. I think she'd look across the dispatch box and she'd say: put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem."

As they say in rap parlance: Shots were now being fired.

And the blue side of the house certainly appreciated it, whooping and jeering at Cameron's pithy rebuttal. The fact that Jeremy Corbyn being a bit on the scruffy side has nothing to do with NHS cuts didn't seem to be as important as the fact that the Labour lot tried to get a bit uppity and so Corbyn got zinged.

Next, Jeremy, perhaps not understanding how 'your mother' jokes are meant to work, brought his own mum into proceedings.

"My mother," he retorted, "would have said: 'stand up for the principle of a health service free at the point of use' because that is what she dedicated her life to."

As is always the case after these undignified displays, the debate soon moved onto Twitter, where the general consensus was: What are the two most powerful men in the country playing at here?

The Liberal Democrats' press office took the view that you 'never bring anyone's mother into a row',

Kate McCann, senior political correspondent at the Daily Telegraph, said: "I usually stand up for PMQs because it is mostly brilliant. But this is playground stuff… This is literally the two most powerful men in the country trading 'yer mum' insults."

ITV's political editor, Robert Peston, noted that it was 'hard not to feel sorry for Jeremy Corbyn' as he was forced to take the flak for an underling's original heckle.

Corbyn, for his part, seemed more affronted by the attack on his sartorial inelegance, and so tweeted a quote from Albert Einstein: "If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes & shoddy furniture let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas & shoddy philosophies."

At the time of writing, Cameron is yet to come back with a retaliatory quote.

If this passage of pathetic piffle had existed in isolation, one could explain it away as the two parties just having a bit of a bad day. After all, as I say, they have a lot on their mind right now.

But it was only on Monday that Corbyn was the subject of a heckle that was, in its way, even more disrespectful than the maternal jibes. And to make us all feel proud, it came straight outta the West Midlands.

Corbyn was discussing a visit to Brussels. "Last week," he said, "I was in Brussels, meeting with heads of government and leaders of European socialist parties, one of whom said to me…"

"Who are you?" piped up Chris Pincher, Conservative MP for Tamworth.

Judging by the 20-second-long chorus of guffaws that followed (even Labour's Andy Burnham was caught on camera grinning ruefully) you would have been forgiven for thinking that Mr Pincher had just reinvented the very concept of the joke, rather than shamelessly grabbed a moment in the limelight via a cheap dig. Albeit an exquisitely timed and very amusing one.

Pincher, too, took to Twitter as the dust settled. He said: "Just finishing up at Westminster before heading off. Still getting... abuse. Oh well. #humourless #realnastyparty."

Now, if 'real nasty party' doesn't sound like rap talk, then I don't know what does. I'm pretty sure that in my time, I've been to a few of them.

The parliamentary to and fro has always veered perilously close to juvenile but this week has seen an unwelcome outbreak of pure kinderpolitik buffoonery that does nobody any real credit.

If this is to be the way forward, with political discourse periodically interrupted by outbreaks of diss and counter-diss – well, if I was a UK rap artist, a Stormzy or an O'Shea (I had to ask a teenager who they are, you may need to as well) then I would be offering up my services as a political gag writer.

Or maybe certain MPs could just grow up a bit. That, though, seems pretty unlikely.