An editor’s notes on Prime Minister’s Questions, the worst half hour in British politics and the most useful
Wednesday, Noon: Thirty Minutes of Shouting I Cannot Stop Watching
I have a rule that the office goes quiet at twelve on a Wednesday. Phones down. Kettle off. The junior staff think this is reverence. It is not. It is the professional attention a fishmonger gives the morning catch. Prime Minister’s Questions is where a good third of our week’s material is landed, flapping, on the slab, and somebody has to be there to gut it.
So I sat today, as I have sat on most Wednesdays for longer than I care to count, with a pad, a cold cup of coffee and the television on the filing cabinet, watching six hundred adults behave in a way that would get them asked to leave a wedding.
What It Is Supposed to Be
The idea is admirable. Once a week, for half an hour, the head of the government must stand up in the House of Commons and answer questions from any member who catches the Speaker’s eye. No notice is required of the subject. The Leader of the Opposition is allowed six questions. There are very few legislatures in the world where the chief executive is exposed in this fashion, and presidents of other countries have said they would not care to try it.
The present form is recent. Until 1997 there were two sessions of fifteen minutes, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They were combined into the single Wednesday bout by an incoming Prime Minister who, one suspects, preferred to be shouted at once a week instead of twice. The full procedure is set out by the UK Parliament for anyone who wants it straight.
What It Is
What it has become is a ritual. The first question is by tradition a request that the Prime Minister list his engagements for the day, to which the answer never varies: meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. This is a relic of an age when ministers could decline questions that were not about their own duties. It persists like an appendix.
Then the exchanges. A question is asked that is really a prepared insult. An answer is given that is really a different prepared insult. Behind each speaker, their side makes the noise of a herd of cattle that has been told a mildly amusing story. Members may not applaud, so they say hear, hear, which run together sounds like a drain. They may not call one another liars, so they have developed forty ways of saying it sideways. They refer to each other as honourable and right honourable in tones that make the words mean their opposite.
The two front benches face each other across a strip of carpet with a red line down each side. Members are not to step over the line while speaking. The story everyone tells is that the lines are two sword-lengths apart. The story is probably nonsense. I have never met anyone who wished it corrected.
Why I Watch
My deputy asked me this morning, not for the first time, why I put myself through it. She is thirty and regards the whole business as a pantomime that has outlived its audience. She may be right. I gave her three reasons.
First, character. You learn more about a politician from thirty unscripted seconds than from a year of speeches. You see who thinks on their feet, who reads from the folder, who enjoys the fight and who is frightened of it. Today I watched a junior member ask a question so obviously planted by the whips that he blushed while reading it. I liked him for the blush.
Second, language. This is where the phrases are born that we shall all be sick of by the weekend. I wrote down four this noon. Two were attempts at wit that had clearly been through a committee. One was a statistic doing the work of an argument. The last was a real joke, made on the spur of the moment by a backbencher, at her own party’s expense, and it got the only honest laugh of the session.
Third, and this is the one my deputy does not accept: it matters that they have to turn up. However degraded the performance, the most powerful person in the country is obliged, weekly, to be in a room with people who despise him and to be seen being asked. Take that away and you would miss it within a month.
The Trade
The difficulty for people in my line of work is that the event is already a caricature of itself. You cannot exaggerate a thing that has been exaggerating itself for decades. I have rejected a dozen pieces this year for the same reason: the real exchange was funnier, and it was in Hansard by teatime, word for word, for free.
We keep an essay on our sister paper, The London Prat, on exactly this point: what satirical commentary is, and what it is not. I make new writers read it. The gist is that the job is not to invent absurdity. The country has adequate supplies. The job is to point at the real absurdity from an angle that makes people see it. A writer who merely makes things up is competing with the Order Paper, and will lose.
The same paper’s page on the British Onion tradition makes the lineage plain. And for readers, who are forever sending us genuine parliamentary exchanges in the belief that we wrote them, there is the indispensable guide on how to tell satire from real news. I have considered having it printed on the back of my business card.
A Personal Note
I have a confession that would end my standing in the trade. I am fond of the place. I went as a student and sat in the gallery, and the chamber was so much smaller than it looks on television, hardly bigger than a parish church, that I understood at once why they shout. There are not enough seats for all the members. It was rebuilt that way on purpose after the bombing, on the argument that a chamber should feel crowded and urgent on a great occasion and not half empty on an ordinary one. That is the shrewdest piece of political design I know of.
So I mock it weekly and I should defend it against anyone who proposed replacing it with something sensible. This is, I am aware, a very English position to hold.
Afterward
By one o’clock we had our list. Three pieces commissioned for this paper, one passed along to the British satirical news desk, and the backbencher’s joke sadly left alone, because it could not be improved.
My deputy says that next Wednesday she is taking her lunch at noon. I said she would be back by ten past. She will. We all are.
The coffee was stone cold. I drank it anyway. It seemed in keeping with the proceedings.
Previous Wednesdays are filed here.