PMQs sketch: Brown has stopped losing
David Cameron and Nick Clegg, utterly lacking their usual pizzazz, subverted the unwritten laws of 21st century opposition leaders by providing substance without any sign of style at all.
Both opposition leaders had every reason to soar to rhetorical heights in this prime minister’s questions, having peaches of government documents up their sleeves.
For the Tories, information revealing two schools backed by the alarming views of Muslim group Hizb-ut-Tahrir could be receiving taxpayers’ money.
For the Lib Dems, a government protocol showing nine handy ways in which departments could suppress material available to the Iraq inquiry.
Both Cameron and Clegg set up their coups in the orthodox way. Step one: the groundwork-laying question, designed to entice Gordon Brown into making smug assertions of perfection.
The Tory leader perhaps went a little too far in this, lulling the PM into a false sense of security by asking him about the “state of bridges” in Cumbria. To be fair, these are displaying an alarming tendency to collapse catastrophically. But the delivery was managerial rather than gravely concerned. There were no attempts to draw comparisons between wobbly bridges and Brown’s wobbly government. Instead Cameron adopted a pained frowning look as he listened to the prime minister discuss the situation. He nodded desperately, like an intellectually challenged footballer trying to show he understands the question being asked him.
Then came what should have been the killer blow, the coup de grace, as he asked Gordon Brown if he had heard of any government money being paid to Hizb-ut-Tahrir.
“I am not aware of them receiving any,” the prime minister replied, all unawares, inviting Cameron to give him some evidence. This should have been the moment when Cameron sprung forth, waving his document theatrically, shouting “aha!”
He did not. Instead he began stage two by saying “I’ll not only give it to him,” after which Labour backbenchers roared their own “ah!” of approval and mocking anticipation. Cameron, put off, soon lost their sympathy. “I fail to understand why the prime minister doesn’t know about this,” he declared. Labour MPs, perfectly reasonably, were baffled by Cameron’s disdain. The PM didn’t lose any credibility.
We can only conclude the Tory leader, if he takes power after the next election, will be some sort of bureaucratic superhero, capable at a moment’s notice of tuning his brain into that of any civil servant’s.
It was quickly clear Brown does not fit this rather demanding bill. There is only one thing a prime minister can do when confronted with the unexpected. “Everything he has said will be investigated in great detail,” he said smoothly, running for the mountains.
Somewhere in the foothills of British politics he ran into Clegg, who had his own hammer blow to deliver. His attempt at lulling the PM into a false sense of security was even more successful than Cameron’s, perhaps because he is capable of astonishing levels of mediocrity in his Commons performances. Brown shrugged off his first question with disdain, allowing Clegg to reveal his trump card. Was it not the case, he suggested in his very frustrated way, that the inquiry had been “suffocated on day one by his government’s shameful culture of secrecy”?
Brown was unimpressed, doling out his oft-repeated platitudes about independence and scrutiny. “He is bound by this!” Clegg bleated unhappily. “He is bound by this!”
Brown, who didn’t appear in the slightest tied up by this sudden confrontation, was completely unshaken. It will take more than these barbs to bring the government down. With the polls looking promising for No 10, and the opposition struggling to capitalise on the gifts handed to them, the collapsing-bridge analogy is looking less apt by the day.
