Today’s PMQs was always going to be centred on the issue of Europe. There are few areas of policy where Cameron’s failure to modernise his party stands more starkly, and after the last few days of Tory split and Liberal outrage, the PM had a lot of ground to make up.
Who won?
The path this week’s PMQs would take had been pretty clearly signposted long before Big Ben struck zwölf. Cameron might not have learned from his party’s messy history on Europe, but he definitely wasn’t going to leave space for any ‘weak, weak, weak’, with solid, if not uninspiring, answers across the dispatch box.
Ed led on Europe with the air of a statesman; opening not on the politics, but on the practicalities of Europe’s current economic situation. He asked about how the prime minister could lead in negotiations on the continent, when he couldn’t manage to lead within his own party.
But last week’s Dragon Dave – that angry, adolescent dragon that never quite learnt to breathe fire – seemed to have simmered down a little. Maybe Dr Fox has started issuing blood pressure warnings with all his new found spare time, but Cameron seemed somewhat more in control of his temper. There was considerable prep on Cameron’s part, combating Miliband’s assertion that the government was split, and returning with more quotes than you could shake an angry Frenchman’s baguette at. None of it got the blood rushing though, but then maybe that’s just what Dragon Dave wanted.
Neither leader made a performance fit for La Scala, nor met the high hopes clear from a good minute’s jeering in the House before either leader had even got a word in. In intelligent debate terms, today’s PMQs shuffled along at a snail’s pace, suffering from that frequent trap of being all about the spin and nothing about the answers; neither leader appeared to have listened to the other.
For a PMQs tête-à-tête that clearly had high expectations, I’d be reluctant to claim either decisively, roundly won the debate. If I were to summarise this week’s PMQ’s in words more familiar to most voters and Europe, it’d have to be a firm ‘nil pwa’.
Best question
In contrast to the shallow debate of the two leaders, Luciana Berger and Alison McGovern both made poignant questions on the far more serious issue of Hillsborough. Luciana Berger opened with a question asking why the prime minister had compared the families of those who died at Hillsborough to ‘a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that wasn’t there’. Cameron clearly squirmed on hearing his words, another sign that he simply doesn’t get many issues beyond Westminster. He also failed in answering a question from Alison McGovern on whether South Yorkshire police would be following the government line in releasing related documents to Hillsborough.
Best joke
This wasn’t really a Prime Minister’s Questions deserving of a feature in Cirque du Soleil, and most backbenchers’ questions focused on remarkably serious issues – two on Hillsborough and another two on murders. But the PM’s quip ‘at least this isn’t in French’ must surely come as comfort to Sarkozy, who has already complained about the PM lecturing him, heaven forbid what would happen to Anglo-French relations if he attempted French.
Benjamin Butterworth is a member of Progress