What a very long PMQs today, presided over by a very bumptious John Bercow. The Speaker let the exchanges run into what he called ‘injury time’, made a rather poisonous jibe at Labour MP Fiona Mactaggart over her private schooling, and told the Prime Minister that as far as he was concerned, he had finished an answer when the PM didn’t believe he had. listen to ‘Cameron defies Bercow’ on Audioboo
PMQs today was bad for David Cameron, but nowhere near as bad as it could have been. No permanent damage was done to him. Ed Miliband did not, to my surprise, come with a set of reforms to the expenses regime that he wanted Cameron to agree to there and then. Instead, he chose to concentrate on what this said about Cameron’s judgment. ‘This is about him’, Miliband thundered. I was, though, surprised not to hear Miliband making more of his usual line that Cameron ‘stands up for the wrong people.’ listen to ‘PMQs: Cameron and Miliband on Maria Miller’ on Audioboo
PMQs was very messy for David Cameron. It was never going to be fun coming after Maria Miller’s resignation (although it would have been a lot less fun if Miller hadn’t gone). But Cameron made things worse in place by making strange comments that seemed to suggest that he thought Ed Miliband should have called for Miller’s head. He said: ‘I have to say it is rather extraordinary, the right hon. Gentleman now coming here, having not said she should resign and saying she should have resigned. I think it shows all the signs of someone seeing a political bandwagon and wanting to jump on it! He is jumping on
Ed Miliband faces a big decision tonight, does he use PMQs tomorrow to call for Maria Miller’s resignation. So far, he has limited himself to saying that Cameron has questions to answer about how this whole business has been handled. But if Miliband went for it at PMQs, it would keep this story going for yet another day. It would also fit Miliband’s argument that Cameron is a Prime Minister who ‘stands up for the wrong people’. Set against this, though, is the question of whether it is in the interests of any party to get into a row over expenses. Tory MPs are quick to point out that five
Cameron, the king of the mood swings, was on typical form today. He veers between calmness and rage with alarming rapidity. The pattern is always the same. He deals reasonably with Miliband’s opening questions but the mercury starts to rise at around Question Four, and his temper reaches straitjacket level on Question Six. He called Ed Miliband and Ed Balls ‘the two muppets’ for mismanaging the Royal Mail while in office. Their bungling cost the exchequer billions, he said. And they didn’t dare privatise the firm for fear of antagonising angry posties and union bosses. Miliband accused Cameron of flogging the company cheap to enrich the Square Mile. At today’s
The increasingly personal bickering between Cameron and Miliband went on today for most of the session. After a bad tempered set of formal exchanges—with Miliband branding Cameron ‘the dunce of Downing Street’ and Cameron calling Miliband and Balls ‘muppets’—the two front benches continued to trade barbs as backbenchers asked their questions. At one point, Cameron even accused Miliband of laughing at the failings of the Welsh NHS. listen to ‘PMQs: Muppets and dunces’ on Audioboo Miliband went on the sale of Royal Mail and the fact that the share price has shot up since the government sold it off. Miliband wasn’t quite clear whether he wanted to mock Cameron and the
Today at Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron accused Ed Miliband of ignoring his own party’s manifesto on the Royal Mail. He said: ‘He said just then, Mr Speaker, it’s a sale nobody wanted. It’s in his manifesto! It was a commitment of the last government!’ listen to ‘PMQs: Muppets and dunces’ on Audioboo So what does the Labour 2010 manifesto actually say? Here’s the section on the Royal Mail: ‘The universal postal service delivered by the Royal Mail connects and binds us together as a country. We are firmly committed to the 28 million homes and businesses across the country receiving mail six days a week, with the promise that
Last week, if you can remember that far back, World War Three was about to start in Ukraine. The fixture was postponed, thankfully, and politics at Westminster has returned to the usual domestic blood-letting. Both leaders were in chipper mood. Cameron sees everything moving in his direction, including the Labour party which has accepted his benefits cap. Miliband was equally buoyed up. He was grinning and skipping at the despatch box like a boxing kangaroo. The energy giant SSE had just announced a price freeze till 2016. Which is exactly what Miliband prescribed last autumn. So today, at least, he appears to be running the country. Naturally he made the
Ed Miliband started strongly at PMQs today. He seized on Scottish and Southern’s announcement that they’ll freeze energy prices as a justification of his most popular policy, the energy price freeze. He mockingly asked Cameron if he still thought the idea was unworkable and a Communist plot. listen to ‘PMQs: Cameron vs Miliband on energy prices’ on Audioboo
Tony Benn, the most divisive left-wing figure since the war, united the house today. David Cameron paid tribute to him as an orator, diarist and campaigner. Ed Miliband praised his determination to ‘champion the powerless’ and hold the executive to account. Miliband moved to Crimea. He called Sunday’s plebiscite ‘illegal and illegitimate’. Cameron trumped him with a curious phrase that bolted a bit of punchy modern sloganising onto a fragment of olde Englishe slang. The referendum, he said, had been ‘spatch-cocked together in ten days at the point of a Russian Kalashnikov’. The leaders, both keen to denounce Russia in the most savage terms, swapped promises about travel bans, asset
Hattie Harman tried to crack Clegg today. The deputy prime minister, standing in for David Cameron, explained carefully that his boss was visiting, ‘Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories.’ Not a title the Israeli Tourist board has got round to using. Hattie wasn’t on her best form. She tried to draw Clegg as a hypocritical house-slave attempting to duck responsibility for his master’s actions. But she plodded through her jibes. Over-rehearsal had killed her hunger to perform. And Clegg met all her accusations with a simple ploy. Blame Labour. It worked every time. On the bedroom tax Clegg had the support of the figures. A million and a half are
One of the more remarkable exchanges of today’s PMQs was the intervention by John Woodcock towards the end of the session. He surprised colleagues by calling the failure to intervene in Syria ‘shameful’: ‘This week marks three years since the bloodshed began in Syria. More than two and a half million people have fled the country and the dead can no longer even be counted. We must all bear responsibility for our shameful failure to intervene. But they are supposed to be the ones – they are supposed to be the ones running the country. So what renewed effort will his government make to end the slaughter before all hope
With David Cameron in Israel today, it was the deputies’ turn at PMQs. These Clegg/Harman sessions are, by now, thoroughly predictable. Harman attacks the Lib Dems as the Tories’ accomplices while Clegg gets stuck into some spirited Labour-bashing. listen to ‘Clegg and Harman at PMQs’ on Audioboo
We all know what’s wrong with ya-boo politics. Today we saw what’s right with it. Instead of the usual shouting match we had a calm, well-mannered, (and deadly dull,) debate. Miliband devoted all six questions to Ukraine. The party leaders tried to outdo each other in self-importance, bombast and name-dropping. ‘High sentence’ was very much the style. In Miliband’s estimation we face, ‘the biggest crisis on this continent since Kosovo.’ So for him the tangled history of Europe reaches all the way back to the 1990s. His verdict followed. ‘These actions deserve to be condemned unreservedly,’ he said unmelodiously. Cameron blathered about the EU leaders’ summit tomorrow. Miliband agreed that
Six questions from Ed Miliband on Ukraine resulted in a calmer, more discursive PMQs than normal. Though I suspect that the headlines will be grabbed by Samantha Cameron’s presence in the chamber. In response to Miliband’s questions, Cameron indicated that he expected to boycott the G8 meeting in Russia saying that it was ‘hard to see how a G8 meeting could take place in these circumstances.’ Miliband tried to move Cameron towards a tougher line on travel restrictions on the Russian elite, but Cameron side-stepped the question. listen to ‘PMQs: Cameron and Miliband on Ukraine’ on Audioboo
Will PMQs return to rowdiness today? The Chamber was a little quiet last week, which was perhaps down to a combination of rather serious questions from MPs and the debates over recess about whether the session had become more juvenile. But this isn’t down to any plan by the Prime Minister: I hear that recently told a group of supporters that while he had sympathy with Ed Miliband’s attempt to cool things down, he’d tried that himself and it hadn’t worked at all. What will be interesting is whether Ed Miliband – or his colleagues on the Labour benches – raise the arrest of Patrick Rock. Number 10 is accused
Earlier this week David Cameron threatened the Lib Dems with divorce. Today, two of their senior figures offered to kiss and make up. Sir Alan Beith and Sir Bob Russell, bearing their knighthoods like dented old battle-shields, made their overtures at PMQs. Each of these leathery old libertarians seems to have discovered his inner Tory. Sir Alan went first. He invited Cameron to slap down rogue Anglicans who dare to criticise welfare reform. ‘There’s nothing moral about pouring more borrowed money into systems that trap people in poverty,’ he said. Cameron accepted Sir Alan’s invitation for a waltz. Greeting him as ‘a ‘distinguished churchman himself’, the prime minister praised his
Ed Miliband again went on climate change and the floods at Prime Minister’s Questions. Miliband believes that Cameron is vulnerable on this subject, that people will notice how Cameron – who used to say ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ – has now gone cold on this issue. listen to ‘PMQs: Cameron and Miliband on climate change’ on Audioboo
A rite of passage for any Opposition leader these days is to promise to make politics more decent and connected to people’s lives. One recent Opposition leader said this, for example: ‘And we need to change, and we will change, the way we behave. I’m fed up with the Punch and Judy politics of Westminster, the name calling, backbiting, point scoring, finger pointing.’ David Cameron, who said this in his leadership acceptance speech in 2005, now has a team of MPs who help heckle Labour in the Commons during Prime Minister’s Questions. This was mainly in response to Labour being much better at heckling, with Ed Balls gesticulating and sledging
Wellies off, gloves on. The party leaders greeted each other with forced displays of warmth and mutual esteem today. Outside, the gusts blew, the rivers rose and the heavens wept. Floods dominated everything. The PM has spent so much time with emergency committees that he’s adopted their can-do battlefield vocabulary. He talked of ‘Gold Commanders calling on military assets’ which is butch-speak for ‘squaddies with shovels being shouted at by Ruperts.’ Having sploshed around for ten days with flow-rate experts and sandbank architects he is also a world authority on flood management. The Thames, he declared, with Michael Fish-like gravity, ‘is expected to reach a second peak on Sunday or
