Adam Boulton Diary – Boris bombing at PMQs shows all is not well
There is an unwritten rule in Westminster – however great the desire for change may be, some things remain the same. The very first session of PMQs this week demonstrated painfully that this Prime Minister still has a big problem with Prime Minister’s Questions. After a year in the job, Boris Johnson still hasn’t got the knack of coming out on top in spite of all the procedural rules being stacked in the Prime Minister’s favour. This week his refusal to answer the questions put to him even earned a rebuke from the equable new Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle.
As he proved hands down last December, the Conservatives were absolutely right to opt for Johnson as an election winner. Yet election winning, it turns out, is not necessarily the same as leading convincingly thereafter.
On Wednesday, Johnson turned in a stinker at PMQs. It was worse but of a piece with this Prime Minister’s underwhelming outings so far at noon on Wednesday in the Commons. The much vaunted master communicator never managed to land a memorable knock-out blow on that “mutton-headed old mugwump” Jeremy Corbyn, and he has yet to bruise Ian Blackford, the reliably pompous Scottish Nationalist leader in Westminster. Since the election, Sir Keir Starmer hasn’t come in range of Johnson’s verbal fisticuffs. The Prime Minister still seems to be aiming his jabs at the last Labour leader instead of the current one.
It’s beginning to look as though the problem is not the strength of Johnson’s opponents but fundamental structural weaknesses in this Prime Minister’s fight plan. Johnson had all summer to prepare but this week the sketch writers for the Tory press declined to cover up for him. On the in-house website ConservativeHome, Andrew Gimson likened the Prime Minister to “a schoolboy who has not merely failed to do his homework but has not taken the trouble to think up any plausible excuse for doing so”.
In the Daily Telegraph Michael Deacon sketched a leader who was “incoherent, irritable and often bewilderingly irrelevant”. In The Times Quentin Letts conceded Starmer was “pretty factual” in his charges that Johnson was “tin-eared”, “making it up as he goes along”, lacking grip and doing U-turns. Henry Deedes in the Daily Mail judged Johnson to have been “provocatively poor”.
Claiming to speak on behalf of “real people”, some armchair experts opine that repeated failings at PMQs don’t matter because only “political anoraks” watch it the whole way through. This is true up to a point: broadcast in snippets on the main news bulletins, Johnson’s contribution this week may look almost as serviceable as his opponents’. But it now is easier than ever to watch the full version and there seems to be an appetite for it. The number of outlets broadcasting PMQs live actually increased this week with the arrival of Times Radio. Digital technology including YouTube and Parliament’s own website means today’s viewers can catch up offline at the press of a few buttons.
Even if PMQs were just froth in the Westminster bubble, they have become the focus of the political week in a way Harold Macmillan and R.A. Butler never foresaw when they first timetabled them on the order paper in 1961.
By chance, this week I rewatched Tony Blair’s first Questions as Prime Minister on 21st May 1997. MPs on all sides congratulated him on New Labour’s innovation of combining the previous 15 minutes sessions on Tuesday and Thursday into a single 30 minutes each Wednesday. They reckoned then that they got more business transacted under the new system. The main differences between then and now were that the new Prime Minister was ferociously well briefed and that John Major, the outgoing Leader of the Opposition, sat back and did not intervene until the middle of the session.
Blair’s intention may have been to free up his diary for extra-parliamentary activities, but he also sharpened the relevance of PMQs as an event, one in which his main opponent had more questions in which to develop their arguments. (William Hague was great at PMQs but failed to make voters take him seriously.)
Blair made himself widely available elsewhere for interviews and press conferences. Since him the trend has been to cut back on public appearances in which a Prime Minister can be held to account. This has only heightened the importance of PMQs. Johnson calculatedly tried to undermine the uniqueness of PMQs by introducing “People’s Questiontime” online. The rigged nature of the questions and the inability of questioners to challenge has achieved little more than handing Private Eye a meme to mock Johnson in its parade of Prime Ministerial parodies stretching back through “Dear Bill” to “Mrs Wilson’s Diary”.
Prime Minister Johnson is not President Trump, who can pronounce or tweet what he likes from the Bully Pulpit unchecked by anyone. The leaders of the main opposition parties have the chance to answer back at PMQs. What happens is also subjected to instantaneous scrutiny. These circumstances are inconvenient for Johnson, who likened his previous work as a columnist to throwing bricks over a wall and waiting to hear the glass tinkle. He was a hit-and-run columnist who could get away with inaccuracies, slurs and political incorrectness in his drive-by shootings. At PMQs, however, the Prime Minister is obliged to face the consequences of his actions and words. He is tested as to whether he really knows what he is talking about.
Johnson’s tactic under fire is to hit back, even when his response is “irrelevant”, as one sketch writer put it. He is not alone in doing so. Challenged on the proposed hiring of the ex-Australian PM Tony Abbott, the Trade Secretary Liz Truss tried to deflect the issue by bringing up past comments made by Corbyn’s closest ally John McDonnell.
As for Johnson’s sally that Starmer served under Corbyn, an alleged IRA sympathiser, the barb rapidly backfired. He inadvertently opened the door for Starmer to demand an apology and to advertise his difference from his predecessor by burnishing his own credentials as a former Director of Public Prosecutions with experience working as a legal adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board.
This has been a difficult Summer for the government. Covid-19 has resulted in a number of unforced errors and U-turns by the government. The task of a leader is to put heart back into their troops, and to convince the country that they know what they are doing – above all in the spotlight of PMQs. This Prime Minister is failing at that, as the rising number of critical comments from Conservative MPs demonstrates.
When he was building his reputation through public appearances, Boris Johnson’s clever schtick to get round doing homework was to pretend amusingly that he hadn’t a clue: “Now where am I? and what am I supposed to be talking about?” Before launching a few old jokes and a handful of carefully pre-cooked zingers. That simply doesn’t work for a Prime Minister at PMQs.
Perhaps even worse for this Prime Minister, the world is watching. Failure to master the PMQs format could knock down the fees he can command on the speaking circuit when he eventually retires from Number Ten.