What is Prime Ministers’ Questions? Is it a simple contest of ideas? Or is it a judicial roasting in which a lone defendant, governed by strict rules, must face an army of malign inquisitors? Boris thinks it’s an open debate about policy. Speaker Hoyle sees it as a court-hearing over which he presides as judge and procedural expert.
Today they clashed.
It began with Sir Keir Starmer blowing holes in Boris’s botched catch-up plan for schools. A government wonk, Sir Kevan Collins, had ordered huge sums to be lavished on the programme but the Treasury declined. Boris agreed with the Treasury. And Sir Kevan flounced off into obscurity leaving a few stinging insults about the education department in his wake. Ho-hum. Just another day in Whitehall.
But Sir Keir Starmer affected to be horrified at the abandonment of the Collins Doctrine. ‘It will hold back Britain for a generation,’ he gasped. He was referring to the fact that our teenagers have missed a term or two of rote-learning.
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