Mark Stuart: Westminster’s Punch and Judy show is open to question

The weekly joust between the Prime Minister and his opposite number has become so much part of the political furniture that one might think it is has a an older pedigree.

In fact, PMQs was Harold Macmillan’s invention, ironic in a Prime Minister who privately admitted to feeling physically sick before his sparring sessions with Hugh Gaitskell.

Despite this, the sitting Prime Minister has always had an inbuilt advantage over the Leader of the Opposition.

As a boy, I vividly recalled listening to the radio as the ever-avuncular Prime Minister, James Callaghan, regularly trounced the then Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher. Only a few years later, Thatcher, by this stage Prime Minister, routinely trounced poor Neil Kinnock across the Dispatch Box, thanks to a file full of facts compiled by an army of civil servants.

Following his landslide victory in 1997, Tony Blair upset many parliamentary observers by chopping two 15-minute PMQs on a Tuesday and Thursday to one half hour session on a Wednesday.

The new slot led to more sustained questioning, especially by the Leader of the Opposition, who was now permitted six questions. However, it had the unintended effect of shortening the parliamentary week. MPs drifted away from Westminster on a Wednesday afternoon after the Prime Minister had spoken. One welcome reform would be to shift PMQs to a Thursday, thereby forcing MPs to stay to scrutinise the Government instead of being over-paid social workers in their constituencies.

Another unwelcome trend during the Blair era was the emergence of patsy questions. Telling the Prime Minister of the day how wonderful he or she is hardly enhances the scrutiny of the executive.

Take this particularly fawning question asked by John Gunnell, the former Labour MP for Morley and Rothwell in July 1997: “Will my right hon Friend welcome today’s inward investment in Yorkshire, and join the Deputy Prime Minister, who is welcoming that investment on-site? Does the Prime Minister agree that the combination of a Labour Government and Labour-led local authorities, all committed to inward investment, will improve our performance in coming years?”

Some MPs don’t even ask a proper question about Government policy, preferring instead to launch into an irrelevant attack on the Opposition.

Despite such abuses of the system, the current Speaker, John Bercow, has proved adept at cutting short MPs when they transgress in this way. He has also paved the way for much shorter questions, so that more questions can be fitted in.

However, he hasn’t been able to stop Hon Members reading out helpful comments crafted by the whips, nor pandering to the folks back home by shoe horning in mentions of their constituencies at every turn.

Despite Blair’s marginalisation of Parliament, at least he agreed to submit to a twice-yearly scrutiny in front of the Liaison Committee – made up of the chair of all the select committees.

It is often forgotten that no other Prime Minister had agreed to such a grilling in front of a select committee for 65 years. Perhaps Blair was shrewd enough to realise that the old theatre of PMQs was beginning to wear thin with a public tired of the old Punch and Judy show.

No wonder. Prime Ministers of whatever hue routinely fail to answer the questions put to them by Leaders of the Opposition. David Cameron follows in Blair’s footsteps in this regard. The public is left frustrated by the lack of straight answers to straight questions. Meanwhile, the overall level of behaviour in the Chamber is appalling. The atmosphere is nothing short of a bear-pit.

The only audience that seems to love PMQs is in America, where they tune in every week to savour our quaint parliamentary traditions. We may mock those traditions, but we often forget that no other head of the executive is subject to the weekly grilling that our Prime Minister receives.

And besides, the weekly Punch and Judy still matters in parliamentary terms. Ever since it was first televised in 1989, no political leader can survive long in the job without being able to handle the rough-and-tumble of PMQs. Even in Opposition, performance is still a huge part of the job. Although the electorate never warmed to William Hague as Tory leader from 1997-2001, he was able to remain in post for a full term partly because he cheered up his troops, especially when there was no immediate prospect of a return to Government.

By contrast, his successor Iain Duncan Smith found himself out of the job in less than two years partly due to his regular failures at the Dispatch Box.

Nevertheless, there is a real sense in which the theatrical nature of Prime Minister’s Question Time has long since past its sell-by-date. Perhaps in another 50 years’ time, it will suffer the same fate as music hall: fondly recalled as a quaint old tradition that passed into obscurity.