Hall of Shame: How three Tory MPs wasted time at PMQs

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle is very keen that Prime Minister’s Questions last its allotted half an hour, rather than turning it into the hour-long drone-fest that John Bercow indulged in during his tenure. Today he had to cut off one MP who was asking a question that wasn’t just pointless (the Speaker doesn’t adjudicate on the quality of interventions, more’s the pity), but that was also taking longer than one of Bercow’s famous soliloquies about himself.

This most pointless question of the session – indeed the year so far – came from new Tory MP Sarah Dines, who asked this:

‘My right hon. Friend will know that the quarries of the Peak district provide a huge proportion of the national building and mineral needs of this great nation. We would be delighted to see him in the Derbyshire Dales, so that he can see at first hand the men and women who work at the quarry face, who will be at the heart of the post-Brexit economy, and look at the need for my local Ashbourne bypass—this is necessary to deliver Brexit to the people.