Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How Corbyn failed to transform PMQs

Prime Minister’s Questions is now regarded in Westminster as being even more pointless than it used to be before. The general weakness of Jeremy Corbyn and his parliamentary party’s ongoing but powerless dissatisfaction with the Labour leader means that it is rarely a session where the Opposition lays a glove on the Prime Minister – and even more unusually a session which Labour MPs leave feeling proud of their party. It’s not just Labour that makes the session feel a bit miserable: even when Corbyn does score a hit, as he has done on social care in recent weeks, Tory backbenchers forget that their job as members of the legislature is to scrutinise the executive and instead squander their questions by sucking up to the Prime Minister with pointless observations about jobs fairs, motherhood, and apple pie. And that’s when they’re not making strange mooing sounds at the other side.

But it was not so long ago that Labour was promising to shake up Prime Minister’s Questions and make it more relevant to the public. Jeremy Corbyn produced with a flourish (or as much of a flourish as he could muster) a series of questions from members of the public at his first session. He then tried to calm the session down by fixing any troublemakers with the gimlet eye of the angry geography teacher. Sadly that teacher seems to have been replaced by a rather more disorganised and grumpy supply teacher who has largely dropped the ‘Beryl from Berwick’ questions. So have the public changed their minds about the way PMQs works?

After Corbyn’s first PMQs, YouGov ran a poll examining the attitudes of voters to Corbyn’s stint at the dispatch box. There hasn’t been any polling since, and the session has changed a great deal, so I asked the pollsters to run the same questions again last week.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in