PMQs: A distraction from the main event
Watching today’s question time was a little like choosing to go to the Muppet Movie when Frost/Nixon was showing just down the road.
No offence intended to either Harriet Harman or William Hague, but a B-team PMQs was never going to have the draw of the Iraq inquiry’s probing of former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith.
But, with impeccable timing, just as Goldsmith was explaining in the most lawyerly language why he changed his mind over the legality of the war, it was over to the Commons chamber.
And over there, it was a pretty tedious clash over the economy with the deputy Tory leader demanding Obama-style policies over the banks and the deputy Labour leader telling him to forget it.
An interesting bit of political cross-dressing.
Sadly, these two have entirely abandoned their old habit of poking fun at each other which occasionally lit up their exchanges. Probably because, while we all enjoyed it, they were pretty evenly matched, and a score draw is not what backbenchers want.
Liberal Democrat stand-in Vince Cable sought to embarrass Harman over the findings of her own pet project, the National Equality Panel, which suggested inequality had worsened under Labour.
Oh no it hasn’t, she said, adding that his party’s plans for “savage” spending cuts would make things even worse.
Things livened up a little when Tory David Jones reminded us that Lord Mandelson had once said he was happy with people becoming filthy rich under Labour, and asked if that applied to former PM Tony Blair.
Harman ducked, but prompted laughter when she said she was all in favour of social mobility – although Blair’s social mobility is probably not what she meant.
She was equally unwilling to engage with the question of whether she had regrets over her part in the decision to send Britain to war on Iraq.
Let’s wait for the outcome of the Chilcot inquiry, she said.
Just another reminder that the real show was not here but 100 yards over the road at the QE2 centre where Lord Goldsmith was, presumably, refusing to hand over a smoking gun.
Three points to your great posts on PMQs:
1) The Harman/Labour stance on mobility is total hypocrisy of the highest order. What about Blair and giving his kids a lift up the social ladder? I seem to remember they got Euan a flat for uni, and also got the boy work experience….Yet most of us have to duck and dive to get work or work experience.
2) Hague has lost his razmataz of his former PMQs era. But he did well today.
3) Gordon Brown gets off scott free today because he doesn’t have to answer tough questions like why he said Britain was best placed to weather the storm, when we are the last country to come out of recession in G8?
I agree, these Deputy PMQs are non-events at moment….