target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#u19792bdd-dd0b-53b0-b6aa-0f674dc0a2e4">chapter 3).
A measure of control? Prime Minister’s Questions
According to David Cameron – who had helped prepare John Major for Prime Minister’s Questions, then witnessed the occasion successively as backbench MP, frontbench Opposition spokesperson, Opposition leader and Prime Minister – the (now) weekly engagement is ‘adversarial, noisy, partisan and unpredictable … It is as intimidating, demanding, exhausting and downright terrifying as anything you do as prime minister.’ However, Cameron’s account also emphasizes the potential upsides: it gives the Prime Minister a chance ‘to demonstrate that you’re the leader of your pack’, and ‘you always get the last word’ (Cameron, 2019, 241–3).
Having the last line in any dramatic performance is not necessarily decisive; otherwise Fortinbras would be regarded as the main character in Hamlet. This is not to belittle the advantage of being able to deliver the final riposte – so long as one is furnished by helpful wordsmiths with deadly quips, ‘killer facts’ or ingenious evasions to meet every occasion. Thanks to their lengthy preparations, Prime Ministers usually are in this happy position when they visit the Commons for PMQs. Nevertheless, these occasions are extremely stressful, and it is little wonder that Tony Blair chose to reduce the ordeals from two quarter-hour sessions per week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) to a single one lasting half an hour on Wednesdays (although this reform came with the beneficial by-product of making attendance at the Commons semi-compulsory on one day rather than two).
The stage fright is understandable. No amount of preparation should be sufficient to save a second-rate performer from humiliation at PMQs, but even really skilful debaters have to be on guard throughout, in case they spoil everything with a single verbal slip. As Cameron noted, ‘Weaknesses, failings, uncertainties, lack of knowledge – all these things and more are found out’ if the Prime Minister is substandard or below par thanks to fatigue or distractions (Cameron, 2019, 38). The real advantage enjoyed by every Prime Minister is suggested by Cameron’s reference to ‘leader of your pack’. In normal circumstances, the Prime Minister is at least the nominal chief of the largest ‘pack’ in the House of Commons. Even if the party is desperate for a change at the top, it has every incentive to use PMQs as an opportunity to engage in outward displays of loyalty by making the loudest semi-articulate noises (the absence of which seemed to affect Boris Johnson’s performances during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic).
It is, nevertheless, probably significant that the most notable ovations have been granted to Prime Ministers who have already signalled their intention to depart. Margaret Thatcher’s last question time was something of a love-fest – even before she had said a word she was lauded with cries of ‘Hear! Hear!’ Tony Blair’s final utterance (a less eloquent version of Hamlet’s ‘the rest is silence’) was followed by applause from both sides of the House, and although Theresa May’s send-off was not unanimous, she was clapped out of the Chamber by the Conservative MPs who had made her premiership so difficult. Yet while the spotlight inevitably falls on the leading members of the cast, backbenchers are more than just ‘extras’. Given the media focus on PMQs as opposed to the rest of parliamentary business, even someone who has obeyed the whip in every vote can have their career blighted if they are sufficiently unwise to ask an awkward question of their own ‘pack’ leader. A backbencher who is caught on camera wearing an unhelpful expression will be deemed to have done more harm to the party than MPs who cast repeated but unpublicized votes against obscure government measures. Thus, while supporters of the British political system continue to praise PMQs as remarkable opportunities for MPs to hold their head of government to account, the weekly show provides the Prime Minister with an excellent opportunity to ensure that the ‘accounting’ is favourable.
The media focus on PMQs has made the occasion seem both more and less significant than it really is. On the one hand, its guaranteed prominence in news bulletins – and its attractions for users of social media – invites even serious students of British politics to ‘bookend’ the tenures of Prime Ministers with one-liners. Thus the Blair era seems to begin with his devastating put-down of John Major (‘I lead my party. He follows his’), and ends with David Cameron’s jibe against a fading Blair (‘He was the future once’). In reality, far from these brilliant barbs sending their recipients snivelling to Buckingham Palace to submit their resignations, Major remained in office for more than two years after Blair’s attack of April 1995, while Blair himself managed to survive the effects of Cameron’s sally (December 2005) for eighteen months, before being snuffed out by his own side. The ineffectual nature of PMQs as a means of exposing the ineptitude (or worse) of the incumbent government is also illustrated by the general verdict that William Hague (Conservative leader, 1997–2001) displayed a flair for the occasion which would have matched any previous Opposition leader. Even so, Hague’s performances were insufficient to inspire voters – the Conservatives gained just one additional parliamentary seat at the 2001 general election. Indeed, far from rallying his backbenchers through his inspired PMQ performances, Hague presided over a period of continued factional strife within the Parliamentary Conservative Party (Walters, 2001). Perhaps the most profound comment on Hague’s ‘success’ in PMQs is the fact that when Conservative members decided on his successor, they opted for someone (Iain Duncan Smith; see below) whose dour demeanour and plodding delivery made him the worstequipped leader for PMQs in the media age.
While the preceding evidence relates to the limitations of PMQs as a platform for effective opposition, regardless of the relative qualities of the performers, there is little evidence that Prime Ministers derive any significant benefits, either. Again, John Major provides an instructive example. In June 1995, Major took the remarkable step of resigning from the leadership of his party (but not as Prime Minister) in order to flush out any potential opponents. A challenger emerged in the shape of one of Major’s ‘bastards’ – the Welsh Secretary, John Redwood. At PMQs a week before the ballot (then restricted to MPs), Major was judged to have surpassed himself, thanks at least partly to a rare tactical error by Tony Blair. Two of Major’s special advisers remembered that ‘Punch followed punch, with Tony Blair cast as Judy’ (Hogg and Hill, 1995, 277). Major himself recalled that after one of his cutting retorts, ‘the mood of the House changed from that of a Roman circus to Sunday Night at the London Palladium’. According to Major’s memoirs, not even Blair could stop himself from grinning when the Prime Minister attributed Redwood’s resignation from the Cabinet to the fact that ‘he was devastated that I had resigned as leader of the Conservative Party’ (Major, 1999, 638). Although a conspiracy theorist might think that Blair had put in a substandard performance at PMQs in order to keep Major in office as an electoral asset for Labour, the Opposition leader had actually regarded the Prime Minister’s resignation as a tactical master stoke, and even Blair’s director of communications, Alastair Campbell, supressed his personal dislike of Major and congratulated him on this performance (Campbell, 2010, 235). With the wind of victory in their sails, Major’s supporters spent the next day ‘working the tea rooms’ at Westminster, and the weekend press before the ballot suggested that almost all of the party’s constituency chairpeople wanted Major to win (Hogg and Hill, 1995, 277–8).
If the importance of PMQs came close to matching its media profile, Major’s nonchalant dismissal of Tony Blair’s attacks should have allayed any doubts among Tory backbenchers. However, in the vote itself, ninety-nine (out of 339) MPs denied their support to the person who was their party leader as well as the incumbent Prime Minister. The obvious inference was that, as soon as PMQs became a media event rather than a parliamentary ritual, its impact even among MPs would be far less lasting, so that a Prime Minister whose position was vulnerable for other reasons would be condemned to live from one weekly test to the next. Equally, Prime Ministers who were rated as good or even brilliant at PMQs would have to sustain their level; even a superlative performance (evoking cries of ‘You can wipe the floor with these people’) will tend to be taken for granted once a Prime Minister has established his or her supremacy in that format. As a result, Conservative MPs who disliked David Cameron’s policy initiatives on ideological grounds could conspire against his leadership even though he
