What to do about PMQs
Sir: Charles Moore (Notes, 6 April) is right to propose that Prime Minister’s Questions revert to the long-standing previous practice of two 15-minute sessions a week (on a Tuesday and Thursday) in place of the current 30-minute session. Tony Blair introduced the present arrangement at the beginning of his premiership for one of the reasons offered by Mr Moore: that it would reduce the time he would have to spend each week on preparation.
Whether Tony’s intention was also, as Mr Moore suggests, to reduce his exposure to attack, I doubt; in any case it certainly did not achieve this. The vulnerability of the Prime Minister to the opposition leader’s questions rises exponentially in relation to the number of questions that can be asked in one go. The six questions allowed in the single Wednesday sessions are potentially more dangerous than the two sets of three questions under the previous system. As a special adviser and then MP I’ve seen four prime ministers handle the two sessions a week; and I’ve witnessed the preparation that went into both Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s single sessions. In my observation the single weekly session has not saved any preparation time at all. Ironically, neither has the new system enhanced Parliament’s role. It has turned PMQs into even more of a bear garden.
Bringing back the two sessions a week would have the added benefit of extending the parliamentary week and end the practice of the whips to try to pack members off to their constituencies on a Wednesday.
Tony was able to make the change because the rota for questions is in the hands of the PM, not the House of Commons. This may be an ancient arrangement but it is preposterous. When and how the prime minister answers to Parliament should be for the Commons to decide.
Rt Hon Jack Straw MP
House of Commons, London SW1
Racing certainty
Sir: Peter Oborne claims that my coverage of the Grand National in the Guardian was ‘deceitful’, since the death of Battlefront on 4 April had nothing to do with the fences at Aintree and my reports suggested otherwise. I can only think that Peter failed to notice the 800-word comment piece the same day, headlined ‘Battlefront death nothing to do with Grand National fences’.
He has my sympathy. I know how difficult it can be for a journalist to squeeze in basic research these days, and it must be even worse for Peter, juggling jobs and deadlines. I’ve just got the one job, which immerses me in the delights of National Hunt racing for four or five months in every 12. I’ve been doing it for many years, and I’ve been accused of many things, including pro-bookie bias, anti-bookie bias, having my snout in the trough and a ‘stupid egg head’ in my picture byline. But I’m not sure where to file your claim that I have an ‘anti-hunt racing bias’, so it will probably be interred with the green-biro letters under ‘too nutty to be worth a second thought’.
Greg Wood
The Guardian, London N1
Thatcher and the ivories
Sir: One unexpected role that the late Baroness Thatcher generously assumed in 1997 has not featured in recent coverage. That was to become the first patron of the Cobbe Collection Trust — a charity which owns the largest group of historical composer-owned keyboard instruments in the world, housed and shown to the public here at Hatchlands, Surrey. She was drawn to it not only by the collection, which comes from all around the world, but perhaps more potently by the fact that her uncle had been a piano-maker. When Lord (then Archie) and Lady Hamilton first brought her to Hatchlands, she was fascinated by the keyboards. She and Sir Denis exhibited an acutely intelligent curiosity in what they saw and heard, whether it was a 17th-century virginals that had been tuned weekly by Purcell or the Broadwood piano on which Chopin gave his last concert. Her timely support was and is very deeply appreciated.
Alec Cobbe
Hatchlands Park, Surrey
Politicians advising bankers
Sir: Martin Vander Weyer reports that Mrs Thatcher demanded of Barclays in 1982 that they needed to be bolder in lending; it seems that they took her at her word for the rest of that decade, hence the enormous bad-debt write-offs of the early 1990s and the bank’s first ever trading loss. The lesson is that politicians should avoid instructing bankers on lending policy; the latter are perfectly capable of making mistakes on their own initiative without further guidance.
David Todd
Feltham, Middlesex
A bit rich
Sir: It is a bit rich for Mr Mitra (‘Health tourists must pay’, 13 April) to claim that the NHS ‘is fundamentally corrupt’ because it is one of the ‘collective institutions of the left’, seeing as it is run by private general practitioners and NHS-paid consultants liberally free to indulge in private work.
Dr Ian Olson
Aberdeen
House prices vs earnings
Sir: Ken Bishop (Letters, 13 April) says there is no relentless upward pressure on house prices in Liverpool. Land Registry and mortgage lender data shows that average house prices in Liverpool (and in the north-west generally) have doubled over the past 20 years. More significantly, average gross earnings in the north-west have only risen by around 67 per cent over the same period. I agree that the situation in the south of England is more extreme. In the south-east, south-west and East Anglia, earnings have risen by more or less the same factor as in the north-west, and house prices have risen by 200 per cent. Even so, it is difficult to argue that the housing market in Liverpool and the north-west has not been subject to the same kind of impulse as further south — the confusion in demand between houses as places to live, and houses as investment assets, to the huge detriment of the former.
Alan Doyle
Sunbury-on-Thames
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