Above: entrance to Black Rod’s garden at Westminster (my photo).
Prime Minister’s Questions today did not involve questions put to the Prime Minister, who is in Japan at the G8 summit. Instead Leader of the House Harriet Harman stood in for Gordon Brown and William Hague stood in for David Cameron. In the studio Guardian journalist Michael White stood in for BBC correspondent Nick Robinson.
On the government front bench Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was poker-faced with occasional smirks, Chancellor Alistair Darling was inscrutable, Secretary for Transport Ruth Kelly smiled continuously as if amused by the whole performance, next to her perky Hazel Blears, cut in half by the camera, seemed to bob up and down very slightly and shake her bright-red hair when giggling or whispering asides.
Most of the questions tended to be worthy but dull - the incidence of “vibration white finger” (an industrial injury); the importance of Working Men’s Clubs in small towns (under threat because of the smoking ban); worries over what would happen to the hunting ban when/if Labour are turfed out of office.
One Labour backbencher urged Harriet Harman to “keep the NHS sparkling” (an odd adjective to use, since the rate of hospital infections indicates the hospitals are anything but sparkling).
Most important issue of the day was raised by Labour backbencher Clive Efford, who asked about “youth crime” in London but in such a partisan way that it seemed as if he was blaming the London Mayor (who has been in office only a few weeks). Clive Efford urged Harriet Harman to “bring together communities” (Terry: “Is the problem inter-communal violence? This is a new admission. I thought the problem was inter-gang violence”). In reply Harriet Harman wittered on about the importance of teachers and parents in solving the problem of knife crime (Terry: “she should ask Teddy Taylor about how the razor gangs in Glasgow were defeated” note - Teddy Taylor is a former MP, now retired).
The exchange between Harriet Harman and William Hague was in two parts. William Hague asked in sober measured tones about the preparations the government were making to manage the economic downturn. This was a clever barb designed to needle Harriet Harman (if she took it seriously it would look as if we are indeed heading for recession, if she laughed it off it would look as if she were in cloud cuckoo land). Harriet Harman gave an unconvincing spluttered reply about how the government would “see the country alright” (my précis). Liberal stand-in Vince Cable asked about the housing crisis. Harriet Harman gave a pedestrian reply, then added as a sort of afterthought (as if she had just remembered her lines) that the opposition was “talking the economy down” (this is one of the thinnest of all defences, and she should be embarrassed to come out with this line).
Harriet Harman told the House a joke (aimed at William Hague) about women bishops, which fell completely flat (timing is everything on these occasions).
In the second tranche of questions William Hague asked about Prime Minister’s strictures on not wasting food, relating it to the rise in the hospitality budget during the time Gordon Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He produced the impressive alliterative phrase: “preaching prudence and practicing profligate waste”. He finished by wishing Harriet Harman well in her personal campaign (according to newspaper reports) to undermine and depose Gordon Brown - Harriet Harman stumbled and stuttered in reply, looking down all the time and refusing to make eye-contact (looking very guilty even though she may be innocent).
More: http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page306.asp
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