Pmqs

PMQs sketch: a subdued week, but the bear-pit will be back

It’s a whole new kind of politics. The subdued atmosphere at PMQs had two possible causes. First, the tragic death of Paul Goggins had stunned the House into near silence. Ed Miliband seemed close to tears as he paid his tribute. ‘Labour has lost one of its own, and one of its best.’ Moving to more substantial issues, Miliband chose the neutral topics of monsoons and roulette machines. He saluted the work of the flood-wardens and the efforts of courageous citizens who had leapt to each others’ aid during the storms. Cameron replied by vowing that river defences would be reinforced with huge sandbags stuffed with cash. Then Miliband moved

Isabel Hardman

Sombre PMQs sees David Cameron test his new line on welfare

PMQs was a rightly sombre affair, coming as it did only a few hours after the death of Labour MP Paul Goggins was announced. It has been striking to hear many MPs of all political persuasions pay tribute to Goggins as a ‘decent’ and ‘kind’ man, and those tributes were echoed in the Chamber. These two qualities are rarely trumpeted in politics and yet when someone does possess them, they have a profound impact on those around them. Ed Miliband split his questions between flooding and fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs). His first tranche, on flooding, was still rather sombre and the Labour leader and the Prime Minister both sought consensus.

Nine months is generous – Ed Balls has nothing to say on the economy

With the economy recovering and Labour floundering, it was a poor PMQs yesterday for Ed Miliband. And the source of his trouble was sitting right next to him – his own Shadow Chancellor. After a disastrous response to the Autumn Statement, Ed Miliband is rumoured to have given Ed Balls nine months to sort out Labour’s economic policy. Clearly riled, Ed Balls has given an interview to the FT this morning, the raison d’etre explicitly being to try and regain some credibility on the economy. And so, somewhat wearily, we have the re-announcement of a ‘zero-based spending review’, six months on from its first outing in June. Try as Balls

PMQs sketch: This being Yuletide there were some turkey ticklers

Christmas is excellent news for a Labour opposition. The season of goodwill throws rich and poor into sharp relief. Red-faced aldermen gather at loaded tables to gobble up roast goose and plum-duff. And afterwards they throw sixpences at starving chimney-sweeps who scrabble for crusts of bread in the snow. At least that’s how it should be. But Labour is in trouble this year. A dearth of bad news has gripped the country. There’s a chronic shortage of shortages. And the lack of a serious crisis is reaching crisis proportions. Ed Miliband is suffering. He looked positively nauseous as he stood up at PMQs and applauded the ‘welcome’ fall in joblessness.

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: a triumph for David Cameron, aided by Ed ‘turkey’ Balls

A Prime Minister can leave PMQs happy if he’s sent his troops off for Christmas in a good mood. Today David Cameron managed that, weaving in festive jokes through a list of statistics that shot Labour down. He was helped by the fact that Ed Miliband didn’t have a coherent line of attack at all, dancing from complaining that the employment figures still showed too many people were in part-time work to energy bills, to the Chancellor’s missed targets on the economy and on to childcare and the the 50p rate. There was a theme here: look at how the country is struggling to get enough work and afford the

PMQs sketch: The snarling between Cameron and Balls enters fresh territory

Christmas is here. And Ed Miliband’s script writers have already got their present. The sack. Really, he seems to have let them go. At PMQs he was reading out insults that pre-date Nicholas Parsons. Out of touch, complacent, the plaything of millionaires. Cameron can fight off such jibes his sleep. Tory backbenchers asked questions full of happy economic tidings. Conservative constituencies are alive with commercial euphoria. New investment, new apprentices, new customers. It’s all thanks to this wise and decisive government. Cameron duly lapped up the credit. Peter Lilley revealed his personal remedy for the proposed pay hike for MPs. ‘Re-table the Boundaries Commission report!’ he advised. In other words fewer MPs

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: Backbenchers eerily silent as bosses discuss their pay

Ed Miliband started off with a soft question to which he already knew the answer at PMQs: ‘Does the PM agree with me that given the crisis ordinary families are facing in their living standards, MPs should not be given a pay rise many times more than inflation in 2015?’ The PM did agree, and offered some further thoughts on the situation. Then Miliband pushed him a bit further. He asked whether the Prime Minister was keen ‘to work with me to find a way on a cross-party basis to make Ipsa think again?’ This whole exchange was carried out to an amusingly eerie silence from backbenchers listening to their

PMQs sketch: Clegg has fun on the train set, but he’s killed chances of a Lib-Lab pact

Crash-bang-wallop. The chances of a Lib-Lab pact in 2015 have just gone hurtling through the floor. David Cameron is away in Beijing looking for Chinese venture capitalists who can turn Britain into the new Africa. Nick Clegg took his place at PMQs. He lost no time socking it to Labour. They were intellectually bankrupt, he said, and economically illiterate. Their energy policy was a con. And union stooges were swamping their membership lists. Harriet Harman hit back. ‘Leave it to us to worry about our party members,’ she said, ‘especially as so many of them used to be his.’ She dismissed Clegg’s favourite idea that he acts as a brake on

James Forsyth

PMQs: Labour’s constant attacks make a Lib-Lab coalition unlikely

Today’s PMQs showed that Labour still have no plan for Nick Clegg other than to attack him. With Clegg standing in for Cameron, Harriet Harman didn’t try and tease out any differences between the coalition partners but instead attacked him as the best deputy any Tory Prime Minister could have and as an accelerator on the Tory agenda not a brake. On one level, this makes sense. There are a certain number of votes on the centre-left of British politics that Labour and the Lib Dems are competing for. Painting the Lib Dems as Tory accomplices helps Labour in this market. But on another, these highly personal attacks on Clegg

Miliband attacks PM for ‘intellectual collapse’ at tepid PMQs

Commentators sometimes like to describe a particular session of Prime Minister’s Questions as ‘vintage’. If ‘vintage’ is the correct description for the good weeks, this one was more of a serving of tepid Blue Nun. David Cameron was in a very odd mood indeed. He was clearly pleased with an early quip referencing Miliband’s Desert Island Discs appearance. He joked that Miliband ‘isn’t loving Marx, he’s loving Engels instead’. The joke was so dreadful that the entire Chamber convulsed as though winded by a fast-moving cricket ball. Miliband attacked the Prime Minister on his inconsistency over payday loan caps and climate change policy. This was a good theme, and gave

Isabel Hardman

Is László Andor spinning for the Tory party?

Tory MPs are in a funny state of mind this morning. They’re pleased that the Prime Minister has started to give some meaty details of what he wants from an EU renegotiation. But they’re also confused that there seems to be no media operation to ‘soak up’ this new line. There aren’t any ministers hogging the microphone in broadcast studios, beyond an exclusive interview that the Prime Minister has given to the BBC. The whole operation could do with a bit more punch. This might change in just under ten minutes’ time when PMQs kicks off, followed by an urgent question on the policy. But before then, here’s another theory.

Nightmare at PMQs!

It started as soon as Ed Miliband stood up at PMQs today. ‘Nightmare!’ yelled the Tories. ‘Nightmare!’ They’d been fired up by the first question from Steve Brine, who craftily double-loaded his query. He referenced the Co-op bank and the ‘nightmare email’ in one sentence. Would the PM respond, he asked, ‘to grave concerns about the nightmare unfolding at the Co-operative?’ Cameron pretended to be all serious. He fretted about the regulatory controls and about safeguarding the bank without fleecing the tax-payer. ‘Nightmare!’ goaded the Tories. Ed Balls, seated beside Miliband, flushed puce. Not a natural Trappist, the shadow chancellor is clearly under orders to shut his gob during PMQs.

James Forsyth

John Bercow presided well over a stormy PMQs

Both sides came to PMQs today armed with prepared lines. David Cameron had the ‘nightmare’ emails and the whole Reverend Flowers and the Co-Op scandal. Ed Miliband had Nick Boles’ admission yesterday that the Tories are seen as the party of the rich. These jibes were duly hurled across the despatch box. But it was evident that Cameron was enjoying the exchanges rather more. When Miliband called Cameron a ‘loser’ he seemed to be trying a touch too hard. listen to ‘Cameron and Miliband at PMQs’ on Audioboo Cameron’s relaxed attitude was also because he knows that there are serious problems coming down the track for Labour. He announced that

Why Cameron’s NHS lines didn’t quite work at PMQs today

Though the NHS made a welcome change from endless bickering about energy bills at today’s PMQs, the exchanges were just as unedifying. There is very little gain in the sort of fact war that David Cameron and Ed Miliband tried to indulge in, as there is no killer fact that can silence an opponent on the NHS. Instead, the exchanges descended very quickly into ‘let me give the right honourable gentleman the facts about the NHS under this government’, ‘we have a Prime Minister too clueless to know the facts’ and ‘once again, the right honourable gentleman is just wrong on the facts’. Each man used his own ‘simple facts’

James Forsyth

PMQs: Relations between Cameron and Bercow break down

PMQs today was a typically bad tempered affair. The Tories have responded to David Cameron’s mauling two weeks ago, by upping the aggression in Cameron’s answers and the noise levels. Today, the Tories wanted to talk about Unite. At every opportunity, Cameron sought to bring Unite the union, who donate millions to Labour, into his answers. He floated the prospect of new laws to combat the aggressive and unpleasant ‘leverage’ tactics that Unite had used at Grangemouth. He likened Ed Miliband to the mayor of a Sicilian town who had been put in by the mafia and was afraid they would take him out if he took them on. Miliband

PMQs sketch: Ed Miliband’s fuel bill and Labour’s trappist vow on public finances

It was a doddle for Ed Miliband at PMQs this afternoon. The nation watched agog yesterday as the energy companies deployed a handful of silk-lined suits to justify their price hikes to a parliamentary committee. Miliband arrived at the house knowing that victory was simple. He just had to fuse the Tories and Big Energy in the public mind and then sit back and enjoy the results. But he got ambushed by David Cameron who had a surprise document up his sleeve. Miliband’s fuel bill. First Cameron reminded us of his advice to consumers last week. ‘Switch your energy company and save £200.’ This idea had been instantly derided by

Isabel Hardman

PMQs: A rather grumpy, unedifying session

Talking about energy bills week in, week out might be good politics for both parties, but it sure does make for a grumpy PMQs session. David Cameron was still rather ratty this week, but he managed some better attacks on Miliband than he’s done in the past few weeks of the great energy debate. He tried to pin the blame for the current state of the energy market on Miliband, saying: ‘Who gave us the Big Six? Yes, when Labour first looked at this, there were almost 20, but because of his stewardship we’ve ended up with six players.’ He also accused the party of pushing for yet more price

PMQs sketch: Cameron is a buffoon who might as well eat his own manifesto

At PMQs today, the Tories’s energy policy went bi-polar. The Conservatives now seem to touch both extremes of the debate. For eight years they’ve presented themselves as a gang of happy tree-huggers who applaud every green subsidy going. But today David Cameron announced his plan to ‘roll back some of the green regulations and charges’. John Major started it all. Yesterday he lurched back into front-line politics by suggesting that energy companies should pay a windfall tax this winter. Otherwise, he said, the poor will have to choose between starving or freezing to death. Number 10 called this bombshell ‘interesting’. Ed Miliband asked David Cameron if John Major was now

James Forsyth

Cameron ‘lost’ PMQs, but he’s moving into a better position on energy bills

David Cameron took a pasting at PMQs today. Ed Miliband, armed with a whole slew of lines from John Major’s speech yesterday, deftly mocked the Prime Minister. Cameron, faced by a Labour wall of noise, struggled to make his replies heard. At one point, he rose to his feet thinking Miliband had finished, only for the Labour leader to contemptuously signal at him to sit down. listen to ‘PMQs: Cameron v s Miliband on energy prices’ on Audioboo But Cameron did announce some policies today that might offer him a way out of the energy hole he’s currently in. First, he made clear that he wants to scale back the

PMQs sketch: Exaggerations, solecisms and clangers

The Clangers are back. And not just on television. At PMQs, both the party leaders tried to embarrass each other with solecisms, exaggerations – and, yes, clangers – which they’d dropped in the past. Ed Miliband led with the cost of living crisis and said ‘record numbers are now working part-time’. Cameron retaliated with a Miliband prediction from October 2010. ‘The government programme will lead to the disappearance of one million jobs,’ Wrong! A million jobs have been created. Miliband brought up his pet-policy, the energy bill freeze, and accused Cameron of supporting the Big Six fuel giants. A price con, not a price freeze, said Cameron. And why had