Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O’Flynn

Boris’s sloppy PMQs performances are becoming a problem

A former prime minister once told me that PMQs in the Commons is an event that can only be enjoyed in retrospect, after the final whistle has blown. Even if exchanges with the opposition leader had gone well, there remained the possibility of being tripped up by a minor party leader, an opposition backbencher or a member of the ‘awkward squad’ on your own side.

Tony Blair disliked it so much that one of his first acts as PM was to cut the sessions from two a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) to just one: a half-hour joust on a Wednesday. His prime motivation for doing so was that he knew the amount of time PMQs preparation had taken up when he was Leader of the Opposition. He concluded that devoting a similar chunk of the working week to it as prime minister would reduce his capacity to govern. But Blair certainly did still prepare intensely for his weekly battles with the likes of William Hague, eventually coining a killer soundbite (‘good jokes, bad judgment’) to neutralise the merciless mockery that Hague subjected him to.

Boris Johnson seems to have pushed PMQs further down his priority list than even Blair ever dared and that is starting to become a problem. A clue to the casual attitude towards this weekly parliamentary event taken by the PM lies in the fact that he does not even amble into the chamber until it is called. Keir Starmer, by contrast, is already in place and is seen to listen carefully to the end of the departmental question time that precedes it.

Of the two men, it is clearly Starmer who knows this is an important weekly moment and has war-gamed the course of exchanges in advance.

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