Pmqs

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 8 December 2010

VERDICT: Tuition fees, tuition fees, tuition fees. Ed Miliband used only one weapon from his armoury today – but it served him unexpectedly well. The Labour leader scraped a contest that, as usual, offered far more heat than light. His attacks were slightly more cutting, his one-liners that little bit more memorable, and it was all the more remarkable given his dreadful performance seven days ago. It wasn’t that Cameron performed badly. The PM rightly – and, at times, effectively – pointed out Labour’s hypocrisy on this issue. But it all seemed a little flat, as though he was reading from a script that had only just been handed to

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

A grim turning point for Ed Miliband

Yesterday’s PMQs already feels like a turning point. It wasn’t so much the nature of David Cameron’s victory – comprehensive though it was – but rather the way  Labour MPs have reacted to Ed Miliband’s defeat. Whatever doubts some of them held privately about their leader have suddenly spilled out, mercilessly, across the snow. In his Daily Mail sketch, Quentin Letts describes Miliband’s excrutiating exit from the chamber yesterday; Guido and the Telegraph are carrying remarks from disgruntled Labour figures. The volume of hostile radio chatter has risen considerably over the past twenty-four hours. Of course, there are several caveats to be slapped across all this – not least that

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nothing Miliband says can rain on Mr Confident’s parade

Back from Zurich, where he’s been helping FIFA determine the winner of the world’s greatest bribery festival, Cameron was in hearty form at PMQs today. He faced Ed Miliband who looks increasingly like the life and soul of the funeral. His party is riding high in the polls – but only when he’s away. As soon as he pops his head back around the door a groan of misery goes up and his rating collapses. Earlier this week the OBR gave an upbeat assessment of the economy so Ed sent his bad-news beavers to sift through it for signs of toxicity. They couldn’t find much. Jobless totals are to rise.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 1 December 2010

VERDICT: A freewheeling, swashbuckling sort of performance from Cameron today, that was encapsulated by a single line: “I’d rather be a Child of Thatcher than a Son of Brown”. Sure, that may not go down too well with lefty Lib Dems nor, indeed, many Scottish voters. But, in the context of PMQs, it was a rapier response to Ed Miliband’s sclerotic lines of questioning. Why the Labour leader chose to completely ignore today’s Mervyn King quotes, and sift unpersuasively through the footnotes of the OBR report, I’m not sure. In any case, the plan didn’t work at all. This was yet another PMQs which generated more heat than light, but

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

The corpse of Black Wednesday has been exhumed, and the demon exorcised 

Cameron clearly doesn’t rate Ed Miliband. That may be a mistake in the long run but it worked fine today. The opposition leader returned to PMQs after a fortnight’s paternity leave and Cameron welcomed him with some warm ceremonial waffle about the new baby. Then came a joke. ‘I know what it’s like,’ said Cameron, ‘the noise; the mess; the chaos; trying to get the children to shut up,’ [Beat], ‘I’m sure he’s glad to have had two weeks away from it.’ This densely worded, carefully crafted, neatly timed quip had obviously been rehearsed at the Tory gag-conference this morning. The fact that Cameron had time to polish it suggests

David Blackburn

PMQs Live blog | 24 November 2010

VERDICT: Ed Miliband did well. He exploited the Cabinet divide on school sport and also illustrated how teachers are wary of Gove’s plans. If anything, this reveals the complexity of the opposition facing Gove, and the extent to which it is ingrained, even within Conservative circles. There was also a withering and effective personal attack on Gove. Cameron laid out his government’s stall: Gove (and arguably Cameron) will stand or fall by it. For once, Labour’s opposition was very clearly delineated. So it should have been: courtesy of the long established system, state education is Labour’s natural territory and many of its MPs and councillors cut their teeth running it

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

A day off for Dave

The giraffe was back. Hattie Harman came to PMQs today wearing That Frock with its eccentric pattern of burnt umber pentagonals framed by light squiggly outlines. A great colour scheme for camouflaging giraffes in Africa. And an even better one for attracting attention in the house. Why does Hattie feel herself particularly giraffic? Her noble breeding naturally aligns her sympathies with an animal that has evolved upwards over many generations and can enjoy the lush topmost leaves not available to lowlier creatures. Or perhaps it’s her unsteady gait as she lumbers through her questions. Or perhaps it’s the fact that if she leans forwards and touches her knees with her

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 17 November 2010

VERDICT: Harriet Harman’s questions must have looked quite clever on paper: a heavy emphasis on police cuts, followed by a quick dose of indigation over the vanity photographers. But, in reality, they were breezily repelled by Cameron. All he had to do was cite the words of Alan Johnson and refer to a list of Labour’s own dodgy hires. By the time Harman attacked the cost of elected police commissioners, leaving Cameron to stand up for greater local democracy and accountability, it was clear who had won this bout: the Prime Minister, by some distance. Although, as Andrew Neil and Tim Montgomerie have noted, the absence of any talk about

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Cheating on the students

Writhe, squirm, cringe and cower. The Commons wanted to inflict ritual punishments on Nick Clegg today for his broken pledges on student fees. The plan nearly succeeded. With Cameron in China, (finding out what happened to our manufacturing base), Clegg took his place at the dispatch box opposite Harriet Harman.    Long practice has given Harman some skill, and even self-possession, at the dispatch box. She had an exceptionally easy target today. As she stood up to give Slick Nick a roasting, the streets around parliament were swelling with angry university-goers waving photos of Clegg signing his fateful election pledge on fees. The LibDem manifesto was being burned in public.

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 10 November 2010

VERDICT: Earlier today, I wrote that the coalition “has few better defenders of its cause than Nick Clegg”. You wouldn’t have guessed it from this PMQs performance. Harman had him on the back foot over tuition fees from the off, and he struggled to give concise, clear answers in return. A pity, because Clegg is right when he says that the coalition has a better policy than Labour’s messy graduate tax – yet there was too much waffle, and too little directness, from him today. The deputy Prime Minister was better when he blazed with anger over Labour’s hypocrisy. But, on the whole, this was a bout to cheer the

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Music hall act fails to cut it next to suave Etonian

Miliband’s in a mess. He makes it far too easy for Cameron to portray him as a hypocritical opportunist who sidles up to PMQs every week with lame soundbites and incoherent policies. How come? Perhaps because he sidles up to PMQs every week with lame soundbites and incoherent policies. Today he tried to unsettle the PM with the news that ‘members of his government’ (ie LibDems) ‘have given cast-iron guarantees that they would vote against a rise in tuition fees.’ This isn’t a Cameron problem. It’s a Clegg problem. Right issue, wrong tactics. Cameron had no difficulty adopting a noble but weary expression and praising his coalition partners for taking

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Hardly vintage stuff from Ed and Dave

Neither Ed Miliband nor David Cameron had a good PMQs. Cameron let his irritation at questions about the appointment of his campaign photographer to a civil service post show. It was also a bit rich for him to criticise a Labour MP for asking a question scripted by the whips when Tory MPs ask patsy questions with monotonous regularity, I counted at least four in this session alone. But the regular shouts of ‘cheese, cheese’ from the Labour benches were clearly riling the Prime Minister. But it wasn’t a good session for Ed Miliband either. His delivery was rather halting and he stumbled on his words far more than he

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 3 November 2010

VERDICT: Perhaps the snappiest exchange between Cameron and Miliband so far, with both men on combative form. Miliband’s charge was that, from tuition fees to child benefit, the coalition is breaking promises that it made before the election. And Cameron’s counter was that he has had to take tough action to deal with the mess that Labour left behind, and that Ed Miliband has nothing to offer to that process other than kneejerk opposition. As exchanges across the dispatch box go, that’s pretty standard stuff – but at least it was packaged with some wit (although little real insight) today. A score draw. 1232: And that’s it. My short verdict

Saturday

Martin Bright

The unofficial parliamentary sketch writer of the year award

For the second year running, my politics class at City University has voted for Ann Treneman as the best parliamentary sketch writer (Quentin Letts won in 2008). I like to have an early session on the parliamentary sketch writer’s art. This is especially useful for foreign students, to whom the concept of the sketch is alien. Indeed, one of my students this year got quite angry. “I just don’t understand this,” she said. “It’s not funny, it’s not clever. I don’t like it.” She could be forgiven for being mystified by Simon Hoggart’s sketch on Transport Questions this week, which was based on children’s classic, The Railway Children, “with twinkle-eyed stationmaster

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Weak, weak, weak

Weak again. For the second session in a row Miliband was feeble at PMQs. He opened in his quiet-assassin mode with a quickie question. ‘There are reports that the government is planning changes to housing benefit reforms. Are they?’ Clearly he meant to wrong-foot Cameron by tempting him into admission which could be instantly disproved. But Cameron simply denied the suggestion and Miliband had no embarrassing disclosure to fire back with. Pretty duff tactics there. He fared slightly better when he asked Cameron what advice he’d give to a family facing a 10 percent cut in housing benefit after the chief bread-winner had been unemployed for a year. Cameron replied

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The new fairness battleground

The f word, fairness, got another outing today at PMQs as David Cameron attempted to defend the coalition’s proposed housing benefit changes from attack by Ed Miliband. Cameron’s argument was that it isn’t fair for people to be subsiding people on housing benefit to live in houses that they couldn’t afford to live in themselves. On this, I strongly suspect that most people in the country agree with him. If Labour wants to turn housing benefit into a big issue, the wedge will work to the Conservatives’ advantage. However, what should be worrying the coalition is that the changes to housing benefit will have to be implemented by local authorities,

Peter Hoskin

PMQs live blog | 27 October 2010

VERDICT: The housing benefit cuts inspired Ed Miliband’s chosen attack – and he deployed it quite effectively, with none of the unclarity that we saw last week. For the most part, though, Cameron stood firm – leaning on his favourite rhetorical stick, What Would Labour Do? – and his final flurry against Ed Miliband was enough, I think, to win him this encounter on points. But don’t expect this housing benefit issue to dissipate quickly. Bob Russell’s question was evidence enough of how tricky this could be for the coalition. 1232: And that’s it. My quick verdict shortly. 1231: Bob Russell, a Lib Dem, says that housing benefit cuts are

Peter Hoskin

Miliband’s stage directions

Labour have sprung a leak, and it’s furnishing the Times with some high-grade copy. Yesterday, the paper got their hands on an internal party memo about economic policy. Today, it’s one on how Ed Miliband should deal with PMQs (£). With this week’s bout only an hour-and-a-half away, here are some of the key snippets: 1. The Big Prize. “The big prize is usually to provoke the PM into appearing evasive by repeatedly failing to answer a simple question, often one that requires a simple Yes or No.” 2. Cheer lines. “It’s important to have a cheer line that goes down well in the chamber and can be clipped easily

Wednesday

Lloyd Evans

Cameron’s warm-up act for Boy George

Cameron was a mere warm-up man at PMQs today. With Osborne’s statement due at 12.30 the session felt like a friendly knock-up rather than the main fixture. Ed Miliband rose to thunderous cheers from his backbenches and he tried to capitalise on their support by opening up an ancient Tory wound – heartless attitudes to unemployment. Spotting Cameron chinwagging with Osborne instead of listening, Miliband chided the PM for not paying attention. ‘Well, it’s a novel concept,’ said Dave smoothly ‘but in this government the prime minister and the chancellor speak to each other.’   Ed’s problem was that the OBR has predicted rising employment for the next three years.