Can the next prime minister please save PMQs?

Perhaps it felt epochal simply because a figure as politically dominant as Boris Johnson was leaving, but this week’s PMQs felt like a kind of passing, as well as a chance for a new beginning. This was the end of our weekly appointments with boisterous baloney; a big boring kind of banality and a damning indictment of what’s wrong with politics. It also turns the mind to what comes next.

Because, right now, one does wonder why on earth anybody would tune into PMQs unless they felt it a kind of duty. And at this point, it certainly feels more about the principle than preference that we watch. The concept of the Prime Minister making themselves available to MPs every week still feels like a sensible one; the last vestige of a better way of doing democracy. It remains a notional connection between the people at the top with the people at the very bottom, the poor electorate represented by those tasked with asking important questions in the House.

Yet it’s also a long time since PMQs worked. If this were a quiz show, it would have been cancelled because the format had grown stale. Even Ant & Dec wouldn’t save it. Time to clear the time slot for something else. Perhaps a cop show set in the Lake District with that guy from the cop show set in the Peak District…

We made all the same complaints under Cameron, of course, but also under Blair. The rot set in at some point in the dark distant past, perhaps around the time they allowed cameras into the House, when MPs started to preen and grandstand, enjoying their moment in the spotlight a little too much. The same was true of prime ministers. It was no time for honesty but hoopla. Get the benches roaring. That was the only game in town, but a pretty shameful game it was and remains to this day.

Speakers have come and gone but none have got to the root of the problem. Most obviously, Lindsay Hoyle is the weakest of the lot, a huffing parody of a Speaker, who displays Erskine May prominently on his shelves but never cares to open it. He rarely brings the executive to order in the way he happily wields the rules over the rest of the House. Under Johnson, he has accepted the creep of unparliamentary language. On Wednesday, Johnson called the Leader of the Opposition a “great pointless human bollard”. He also repeated his habitual “Captain Hindsight” slur, with never a complaint from the Speaker. Yet when John Nicolson from the SNP asked a rather spicy question, his response was unequivocal. It’s worth quoting the question in full.

“As the Prime Minister limps off into the history books,” asked Nicholson, “his name up there in the pantheon of greats like the Duke of Portland and Spencer Perceval, can he update us on his defenestration honours list? How many of his cronies will he ennoble? Can we expect his to exceed Harold Wilson with a lavender list of dodgy donors, obsequious courtiers, and pinchers by nature?”

An eloquently put question, if obviously loaded in the negative and perhaps going in a little hard on three former prime ministers who weren’t there to defend themselves, but it didn’t seem entirely unfair. Yet the Speaker was immediately heard to reply “very poor” and then went on to say “Can I just say, we want a good temper and more moderate language and I don’t think we got it then”.

Assuming he has a point (and perhaps he had), it’s the hypocrisy that rankles. The Speaker simply holds the Prime Minister to a lesser standard than the rest of the Commons. That cannot be allowed to continue.

Our politics is broken in so many ways, from the leaking buildings, an electoral system that rarely reflects the nuanced will of the people, to a two-party system that creaks with constitutional arthritis, but perhaps a new leader could bring about a change, hold themselves to a higher standard than prime ministers of the past. Perhaps a new Speaker (naïve hope but every week one regrets that Chris Bryant didn’t win the chair – he at least seems to care about parliamentary process) could demand that a prime minister answers the questions asked of them, instead of resorting to the usual trick of segueing into an election broadcast: “I don’t know about that but what I do know is that the British people want us to talk about the things that matter to them, like having the highest employment in ten thousand years, winning the World Cup in November to prove the British can still play football at 50°C, and ensuring that bathrooms are labelled clearly in the language that Shakespeare invented…”

Irrespective of the party in power, PMQs have become a terrible waste of a valuable hour in the middle of the week. But then expecting honesty and serious ideas to prevail in the current political climate is a bit like expecting sheep to graze happily on the Moon. Easy to imagine but impossible to carry out without terraforming our entire political landscape.