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PMQs verdict: How could anyone have “won” something as dreadful as that?

February 22, 2012 1:29 pm

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So much of the coverage of PMQs is focussed on the snap verdict. Who won? Who lost? I’m aware that this blog is as guilty as anyone for playing that game. So let’s make this one simple – nobody won today. How could they have, when the event itself was so deeply, stunningly, mind bendingly dreadful.

It started off relatively normal. Loud admittedly, but normal. Ed began with the NHS. Still normal. Cameron dodged the question. Still supremely normal. But something seemed to happen early on in these exchanges that soured the whole mood. Suddenly the pitch of the “debate” was vile, the noise overwhelming.

It’s often said (usually by the speaker) that the public don’t like the behaviour in the chamber. That they find it off putting, raucous and bawdy. Usually I disagree with Parliament’s diminutive referee, but today I was in his corner. ORDER, indeed. A few years ago I considered becoming a teacher, but was put off by the behaviour of kids in classrooms. On reflection this was a naive error – most ruler wielding teenagers are far more decorus and mature than our “honourable” members, on the evidence on today’s 30 minutes of hate.

Trust them to run the country? Either side? On that performance the public would be mad to.

The piece de resistance came near the close of the session when chief irritant and sub-tabloid punster Peter Bone rattled off another of his self-revertial “questions” about the now infamous “Mrs Bone”. Who outside that chamber gives a toss? Lord, give me strength.

The close of the “debate” between the two leaders saw the noise reach it’s crescendo and the two party leaders get off their final salvos. Miliband will be pleased to have squeezed out his “This is your poll tax” barb for the evening news, but it was Cameron who took the veritable biscuit, quoting Alex Hilton’s blogpost from last week. Fair game, you might say. And you’d be right, why not quote the odd blog now and again? (or every other week).

Well it’s always nice to meet a reader Dave, so let me be helpful and get you prepared for next week.

I think your performance today was a disgrace to the office of Prime Minister. I think your support of Andrew Lansley’s health reforms threatens to destroy the NHS. And I think your economic policies will create a lost generation – my generation.

Print that out. Pop it in your file and read it out next Wednesday at noon – that’s if you’re bothering to turn up. I kept it pithy for you so you won’t need to misquote me.

And don’t even get me started on the “fist-bump“…*shudder*…

Related posts:

  1. PMQs verdict: Cut the gags, Ed
  2. PMQs Verdict – Scratching The Paintwork
  3. PMQs verdict – Ed’s best week
  4. PMQs verdict: Miliband lets Cameron off the hook
  5. PMQs verdict: Calm down Dave, and listen to the Doctors…
  • Dave Postles

    NHS.  Is there any definitive answer about the ‘conferences’ on the NHS at Downing St.  First, when criticism arose, Cameron responded that it was the first of a series of ‘conferences’.  If that was the case, the diplomatic approach would have been to state that as the context for the meeting before the criticism arose.   Then, apparently, ‘Downing St’, after the ‘conference’ gave word that there would be no more ‘conferences’.  Yet today, on ‘The World at One’, Pickles suggested that there would be more ‘conferences’ in response to the same criticism about leaving out the absent colleges.  Are they making it up as they go along or have I misunderstood?

    • treborc

       But  their is a battle which should go forward and that is where the NHS is going, but none of them seem to know for sure if the public are really interested any more.

      So they have a few words then off they go onto something else, it did not take five minutes before I turned the TV off.

      PMQs with two very boring people shouting and screaming the rest trying to get the public interested and they seem bored to tears with it all.

      • Dave Postles

        NHS
        TUC March for the NHS: 7 March
        I hope to be there, despite my dislike of London.  You can join the March or support it virtually (and virtuously).
        http://www.tuc.org.uk/industrial/tuc-20597-f0.cfm

        • treborc

          Lets hope the turn out  is better then the one we had down here two weeks ago.I have already put by two pennies in with Welsh labour and the GMB…But boy it’s taken so long the whole thing is nearly over and done.

  • RA

    It’s a shame that Ed didn’t press Cameron more on why the BMA, RCN, RCS etc have been excluded from discussions, after his claims that he was listening to those in the NHS. Thought that was one of the strongest points Ed made during his questions. 

  • Suey2y

    Tell it Mark!! 

    That was cracking :) )

    The whole bunch of them are worse than schoolboys playing “running countries” in the playground. All of them. They’re so disconnected, it’s like watching a foreign species attempt to “govern” us. 

    • AlanGiles

      Own up time. I never watch PMQs – for me 1215 means BBC1 and – let’s go Bargain Hunting….

      It’s fun, it’s just a bit of harmless competition that nobody takes too seriously. We havde red team versus blue team but they are never as obstreperous as their Whitehall counterparts.

  • redcube

    His presentational skills are as awesome as his hatred of all things public

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark-Davis/839040363 Mark Davis

    So much for Mr Cameron getting rid of Punch and Judy politics.

    It’s a regular comment out on the doorsteps that people wish politicians would grow up and stop behaving like children (and badly behaved children at that).

    I accept all the usual lines about the tribal nature of politics, and the confrontational nature of PMQ’s, but if that is the best showcase we’ve got for our democracy, in this time of grave economic and social disquiet, heaven help us.

    I enjoyed my fair share of political knock about when I was a councillor, it can be fun, but at the end of the day the real focus of Prime Minister’s Questions should be on the questions and the PM’s answers (or otherwise) to them.

  • LondonStatto

    Hilton was right. You are wrong.

  • GuyM

    I’ve enjoyed the old Thatcher v Kinnock match ups.

    Major v Blair and then Blair v Hague were good contests.

    At times Brown v Cameron was gripping.

    But Cameron v Milliband is the most terrible waste of 10 minutes of life I can think of.

    Today they were both as bad as each other, Cameron looked the red faced loud Eton boy he is ridiculed as and Milliband a hectoring school prefect who looks a bit like Wallace.

    The problem I think is both of them really actively dislike if not hate the other. I think all degree of professional respect between front benches has gone as well (you can partly thank Ed Balls for that).

    I suspect all we’ll get now is week after week of two people who can’t stand the sight of each other being progressively more rude to each other.

    As you rightly point out, it was dreadful.

  • neil nerva

    Mark 

    Have
    just seen – not edifying  but the point is Cameron lost 
    . See this article and  associated comment 

    http://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2012/02/22/yet-again-another-nhs-pmq-victory-for-miliband/

    Cameron
    rightly took a hammering today. Quoting a post on a Labour blog
    shows exactly how desperate he is. You can’t play the eton wall
    game with the general public. They simply won’t like it – by IoS

    I
    think the PLP needs a cunning plan  and should adopt a team
    approach . Cameron’s evasive / lightweight  answering
    style needs to be challenged . After Ed ‘s questions
    it all becomes a bit random . Each backbench  Labour MP
     called,   should repeat / follow up question on
    behalf of previous colleague who did not get an
    answer . This would have meant that Cameron’s exclusion of
     the RCN / RCGP et al would have been  persistently 
    challenged  with a
    local angle

    Neil

     

    • treborc

       Sadly Cameron was given the roll of leader because he was Blair, in more ways then one, Blair has the same style in saying lots but actually saying nothing.

      It’s now down to the Liberals to stand up and be counted, we all know Clegg has deserted.

  • Edward Wheatley

     Ed Milliban’s choice of HIV as an example in his condemnation of the Tories NHS privatisation, like the Mrs Duffy incident with his predecessor shows that the Labour Leadership are just as out of touch with the masses as are the public schoolboys opposite them.

  • Peter L Carabine

    As you know a lot of  TV Parliament ‘s coverage of the main leaders tonight has switched into the killing of the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin who was covering the daily slaughter of families in Homs by the Syrian Army. And so it should be because so much of what is going on pales into insignificance compared to the  butchery of those hopeless peoples. Maybe I have missed it – but the voices comining from our Party have been almost unheard in relation to these awful events over the last few months.

    There comes a moment in all histories of atrocities that Western leadership says enougth is enougth. We were an Internationalist party in common with all socialist and social democratic parties and now  we should join with the many voices across the world and seek ways of handling these daily killings of families. Doing nothing is no option because it is too immoral. We are not in politics just for the game – this is death on a grand scale and we must join with the Arab league and the UN and seek new approaches to quickly end it before this becomes part of what happens in 2012 and so on.

  • ovaljason

    Mark

    If classroom discipline has so catastrophically broken-down that you feel you cannot teach, who do you feel is responsible for that?

    I’ve no doubt that if we’d just lived through 13 years of a Tory government, you’d blame them.  But we haven’t.

    Answer please.

    • treborc

      Good teachers are born not made.

    • Conrad

      Kids have always misbehaved, i don’t see how you looked at this article and thought the one thing to add was a jab at some anecdotal remark barely linked to the main argument.

  • AlanGiles

    You have to feel some sympathy for Ed Miliband. Today will be yet another day of bad news thanks to the drunken exploits of the “Honourable” Member for Falkirk.

    http://news.sky.com/home/video/uk-news/video/16175434 

    Mr Joyce is an infamous expenses scrounger and was close to the unlamented John Hutton.

    You sometimes  have to wonder if the right-wing of the Labour Parlimentary party do these things deliberately to embarrass the leadership they don’t like.

  • madasafish

    Labour are out of touch because of course they are public schoolboys as well..

    The days of the working man become Labour MPs have long gone.. See the Milibands, G Brown, T Blair, J Straw,, E Balls,Y Cooper   etc..

    J Prescott was the exception that proves the rule.

  • markfergusonuk

    Goodness Jason – you’ve taken my anecdote and run with it haven’t you. I was largely at school under a Tory government. Classroom discipline THEN not NOW put me off (I’ve barely been back in a classroom for 10 years)

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