Questions to the prime minister
The UK government is subject to regular and often intense scrutiny, but could our system find more effective ways to cross-examine the head of the government?
Prime ministers, like any other office-holders in Parliament, have always been subject to questions by whichever house they happen to sit in (since 1902, exclusively the House of Commons). For centuries, these questions were asked without notice, when the prime minister was available in the House, and in whatever order Members could catch the speaker’s eye. In 1881, however, fixed time limits were introduced for questions, and, as a courtesy to the sitting prime minister, William Gladstone, who was 72, those for the head of the government were scheduled for the last slot of the day to avoid his having to rush to the House. The submission of questions was regularised to Tuesdays and Thursdays in 1953.
Older readers will remember the twice-weekly format of Prime Minister’s Questions which obtained until 1997. The prime minister was subjected to two 15-minute periods of questioning on Tuesday and Thursday, starting at 3.15 pm. It is this pattern that I first became familiar with as a young politics obsessive, first with the gentle tones of Jack Weatherill and then the more theatrical performance of Betty Boothroyd as speaker. The televising of proceedings began in November 1989: here is one of Margaret Thatcher’s first broadcast PMQs from 30 November that year, which is worth watching as a study in contrast to today’s chamber. John Major is just finishing answering Treasury questions, flanked by Norman Lamont, chief secretary, and Peter Lilley, financial secretary.
If you will forgive me a brief diversion, let us stop here a moment. The clip is almost 35 years old, but most readers will recognise Neil Kinnock as leader of the opposition, and he is joined on the front bench by Roy Hattersley, his deputy, and the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Margaret Beckett (the only one still in the Commons, I think). Further along the government front bench are Kenneth Baker, party chairman, and Tom King, defence secretary, while at the very end, by the gangway, are the business managers, Sir Geoffrey Howe, leader of the House, and Tim Renton, chief whip. You will also recognise former cabinet minister Norman Tebbit and Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown with speaking parts. A link to the past is provided by Sir William Clark (Con, Croydon South), first elected in Macmillan’s “Never had it so good” victory in 1959; although generally a right-winger and an anti-European, he managed to avoid government office altogether, even under Thatcher.
Two observations. Thatcher, although she was only a year away from being forced out of office by her own party, is imperious and in complete command of her own side. She is also formidably briefed and entirely in control of facts and figures (despite referring to “British Rover/Leyland” at one point). Equally, Kinnock, with only three questions to the leader of the opposition’s six today, uses no notes but is punchy and direct. The House is rather quieter than it would be for PMQs now, although Speaker Weatherill does have to calm Members down at one point to allow Thatcher to respond to a question. On the whole I think it comes across rather better than modern PMQs, though you can see familiar motifs: planted questions "(“Would my right honourable friend agree with me…”), a Conservative government raking up the record of the last Labour administration and rumblings of unease over matters European.
Back to the subject in hand. The pre-1997 format of Tuesdays and Thursdays arose from a 1959 report by the procedure committee. The House and the government were slow to respond, but by July 1961 the idea was accepted, and the first “modern” session of Prime Minister’s Questions was held on Tuesday 18 July. The speaker, Sir Harry Hylton-Foster (who had married the daughter of a predecessor, Speaker Clifton Brown), set the scene.
The House will have observed that the Order Paper today indicates that the Prime Minister will answer his Questions at 3.15 p.m. The Prime Minister has informed me that he is at the service of the House in this matter and is willing to try this experiment for the remainder of the Session, if that be the wish of the House, as I understand it is.
The first question to Harold Macmillan—about the UK ambassador to South Africa, which had recently become a republic and left the Commonwealth—was asked by the elderly Fenner Brockway, Labour MP for Eton and Slough. The session does not sparkle in print, and some of the subjects, like Cyprus and the potential basing of West German forces in the UK, seem recondite now. There are some procedural slips and stumbles, but this was a new procedure. It must have been satisfactory for most MPs: the experiment ended with the last sitting week of that session of Parliament on 4 August, but when the House reconvened in the autumn, it was made a permanent feature and began again on 24 October.
The early years were more charged that people realised, certainly those outside Westminster (sound broadcasting only began in 1978). Macmillan, for all that he cultivated the image of a laid-back Edwardian aristocrat rather in the mould of A.J. Balfour, and had been described famously in 1958 as “unflappable” by Quintin Hailsham, was wracked by nerves. He was physically sick from anxiety before his big occasions in the House, always lunching alone before PMQs, though it is not known whether he took Enoch Powell’s advice that one should speak on a full bladder. But he was an experienced and first-rate performer: dryly witty, quick-thinking and able to go from frail old man (he was 67) to devastating put-down in the blink of an eye.
The prime minister loathed his counterpart, however. Hugh Gaitskell, who had become leader of the Labour Party in 1955, was everything that Macmillan was primed to dislike. Gaitskell was a Wykehamist while Macmillan went to Eton and worshipped the school; Macmillan eyed with suspicion those who had not performed military service, while Gaitskell had been a civil servant during the Second World War, and Macmillan scorned his lack of medals on Remembrance Sunday; and Gaitskell was a philanderer, including a long affair with Ann Fleming (wife of Ian), while Macmillan, never very interested in physical relationships and something of a prude, was stuck in a frequently unhappy marriage to Lady Dorothy (née Cavendish), who was perennially unfaithful.
The style developed over time. Having noted that Thatcher’s session in 1989 was perhaps less rowdy than today, it was Selwyn Lloyd, speaker of the House from 1971 to 1976 and a shrewder judge of character than people often realised, who believed that the tempestuous nature of the sessions sprang from the deep antipathy between Edward Heath and Harold Wilson in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Certainly, in the early years, there had been practices which would seem absurd now: sometimes the prime minister would transfer a question to the relevant departmental minister, while the leader of the opposition did not always use his or her full allocation of questions, sometimes not asking any at all.
The twice-weekly pattern of PMQs lasted more than 30 years, until the Labour landslide of 1997. Tony Blair changed the procedure from two short sessions to one half-hour period on Wednesdays, initially at 3.00 pm and then at 12 noon; the argument was that it gave more time for questions—15 minutes seems very little now, despite the alleged short attention span of modern voters—though opponents of the change pointed out that it reduced the sharp topicality of the questions, as they were presented only once rather than twice a week. To balance the new arrangement, the leader of the opposition was given six questions rather than three, and the leader of the third party (until 2015 the Liberals and Liberal Democrats, now the SNP) two rather than one. (During the 2010-15 coalition, those two questions were given formally to the second-largest opposition party, the DUP, but their Westminster leader, Nigel Dodds, tended then to allow the SNP or Plaid Cymru to ask a question.)
The event is not now in any meaningful sense an innocent attempt to elicit information. The questions to the prime minister come in essentially three forms:
Soft or planted questions from the government benches to allow the prime minister to broadcast some achievement or success, often beginning “Would my right honourable friend agree with me that…?”;
Attempts to put on the record facts or a series of facts which will be embarrassing for the government, for example exposing internal divisions within the government or a lack of frankness about figures or chronology;
Straight partisan attacks to frame government policy in a poor light and try to contrast it with the proposals of opposition parties.
To this I should add a fourth archetype, which has grown in prominence since, I think, 2010, which is the question designed not so much to elicit information, though that may be a bonus, but principally to highlight a local constituency matter and provide a phrase or sentence which can be used in local media. (I have a theory that constituency matters became much more important with the arrival of a new, principally Conservative, intake with slender majorities in 2010, but here is not the place to develop it.)
PMQs are also, of course, now designed around the practice of extracting short cips for social media and other presentational purposes. I am, perhaps unexpectedly, in general an optimist about social media as a whole, and I think we often blame the medium for the message and the messenger, but the prevalence of Twitter, Instagram and TikTok among Members of Parliament does create an insatiable demand for short clips (15 or 20 seconds, perhaps) of them name-checking their constituency or interacting with the great and the good (or at least the prime minister). This need for concision does not, as one might expect, make contributions punchier or more focused, but rather detaches the intended excerpt from the rest of the encounter, as it is the only part which matters, and takes the purpose, the very life force, out of the question.
I am a realist. I don’t think that PMQs is a particularly revealing encounter and I know that it is rowdy, sometimes excessively so. It is a zero-sum game, with the main contenders either winning or losing, and it is not effective scrutiny in the standard sense. There is no opportunity for sustained questioning, for detailed quizzing, for the sharp cross-examination which drives our addiction to legal dramas. It is essentially a game, certainly an artificial performance, and there is a belief that the public finds it childish, boorish and unsophisticated. I’m not so sure, and I have a suspicion that too much is made of this.
In 2014, the Hansard Society teamed up with Ipsos/MORI to measure public opinion on PMQs and draw conclusions. I think the raw figures are not cause for utter despair. 54 per cent of those surveyed had seen or heard at least some of PMQs in the previous year, which is an astonishingly high proportion for a parliamentary proceeding. 47 per cent said that it was too noisy and aggressive and 33 per cent said it put them off politics. But both of those figures are still less than half. And other results are more heartening: 40 per cent agreed that PMQs dealt with the important issues facing the country, and 36 per cent though it was informative. 20 per cent even thought it was exciting to watch! If anything, the results of the polling indicated ignorance (perhaps, but not necessarily uninterest), with the only question receiving a response from more than half was the fact that there was too much party political point-scoring, agreed to by 67 per cent (though one wonders slightly what they expected).
Now, I don’t claim that any of that means the public are generally positive about PMQs. But I do think it means they are not generally negative. They are largely neutral, apathetic or unsure. Nevertheless they do see positive qualities in the occasion, and they broad swathes of don’t-know suggests that they could be influenced if we looked at the process.
The half-hour of PMQs is not, one must understand, in any way representative of business in the House of Commons. It is the highlight of the week, often the only appearance by the prime minister (unless he is delivering a statement or, much less likely, responding to an urgent question), and it is a relatively rare opportunity for MPs to be nakedly and unashamedly partisan and sharp with each other. Genuine ill-feeling between individual MPs is much rarer than you’d think, is not by any means always determined by party affiliation and there are some deeply unlikely friendships across the divide. One should remember the proverbial, perhaps apocryphal, advice given to a young government backbencher that while the opposition sits on the benches across the floor, the enemy is all around you on your side. Reforming it in some way would not quell the appetite for media clips and soundbites I referred to, but rather would simply displace it to another part of the week’s proceedings, and I see no real harm in containing it within the half-hour between noon and 12.30 pm on Wednesdays.
I am also not entirely sure how we could change the session to make it conform to all the idealised picture so many people have of it. There have been repeated, and ignorant, calls, especially on social media, for the speaker somehow to “stop” ministers “lying” or make them answer questions more fully than they have, and this applies particularly to PMQs. But this is a fallacy. I wrote an essay some time ago about the role of the speaker, and I explained that it is not, nor should it be, his job to act as some weird kind of real-time fact checker on ministerial responses, nor could he sensibly make ministers keep answering a question until it satisfied the questioner, the opposition or some phantasm of the viewing public. Making the atmosphere in the House quieter and less boisterous could be done, I suppose, by the speaker embarking on a reign of terror for weeks or months, chastising or expelling those who are disruptive until MPs were beaten into cowed submission, but it would be a lengthy war of attrition, and, in any case, PMQs should be tense and dramatic, not a dreary technocratic exchange suitable for a provincial legislature somewhere in central Europe or the Benelux countries. The Commons has a strong element of theatre and that is no bad thing.
We are also, I believe quite strongly, in danger of overlooking the good things about PMQs. Quite apart from anything else, it is a frequent and mostly unmediated opportunity for MPs to ask the prime minister anything they wish (provided it is within his responsibilities) and without notice. That means that the prime minister must prepare himself thoroughly and be aware of issues across the spectrum of government policy, sufficiently informed to answer questions about them without causing himself embarrassment. That is, surely, a strong measure of regular scrutiny in itself, and keeps the premier on his toes.
It is also direct, robust and brutal, a noisy collective version of the slave who rode with Roman generals in their triumphal parades, whispering in their ears “You are still mortal”. Only perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s compound-armour self-belief protected her from being somewhat humbled, or at least cut down to size, by the encounters, and it is a useful tool in dispelling any self-aggrandising imagination of a lofty, presidential existence. Americans, used to a degree of reverence towards the office, if not the person, of the president are simultaneously aghast at and delighted by the liveliness and directness of PMQs, especially when they compare it to the stage-managed torpor of White House press briefings. Even Anne Perkins, hardly a stiff reactionary, writing in that less-than-hard-right publication The Guardian, expounded in 2014 the advantages of PMQs and suggested it was something we might export.
If PMQs were the only method Parliament had of scrutinising the prime minister personally, I might be more sympathetic to criticism of the occasion and the necessity to reform it. But the prime minister is also held to account in a longer format, at a lower temperature and with more extensive cross-examination when he appears regularly (if not frequently) in front of the House of Commons liaison committee.
The liaison committee was formally created in 1979 as a deliberative body of all select committee chairs. An informal grouping had existed since 1967 but the decision to establish departmental committees saw this formalised. It operates under Standing Order No. 145, and most of its duties are internal and administrative, such as supervising the general operation of select committees, choosing committee reports for debate and setting and policing the rules under which committees operate (including allocating budgets for committee travel, an issue very dear to the hearts of those who serve on select committees). However, it has a public-facing role in that it it is given the opportunity by that standing order to take evidence from the prime minister on “matters of public policy”. Since 2002, it has met twice a year, now usually three times, for this purpose, and it is a serious affair, as any issue can be raised and the committee comprises senior figures with considerable subject specialism.
I do not for a moment pretend that the liaison committee is perfect. It currently has 36 members, which makes it an impossibly unwieldy body of inquiry, and as a result only some members are chosen to question the prime minister at each evidence session. Necessarily this excludes some chairs and therefore effectively the subject areas for which they are responsible, though there are efforts to make sure that over time all chairs have an opportunity to ask questions. It now has its own dedicated clerk and secretariat (in my day it was served by the clerk of committees, a very senior official who oversaw the whole Committee Office and therefore had many other responsibilities) and the preparation for its sessions with the prime minister are thorough and formidable. (I will also add that its current clerk is extremely able and conscientious, though that is a fact of personal characteristics rather than an institutional provision.)
By tradition, the prime minister did not appear in front of select committees since, given that the office is responsible for all government policy, most committees would have sought to take evidence as often as possible, which would have been a logistical impossibility and, if permitted in a limited way, would have caused tension and resentment among committees before which he or she agreed to appear and those whose invitations were declined. A prime example was the Westland crisis of 1985-86, a brouhaha which older readers will recall and which began with competing bids for a West Country helicopter manufacturer and ended in the resignation of the defence secretary and the trade and industry secretary, and a crisis which at the time it was genuinely believed the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, might not survive. It also raised several questions about prime ministerial power and authority, the role of ministers and especially the law officers and the personal leadership style of Thatcher and the characters of some senior cabinet ministers.
The decision was taken that parliamentary inquiry into the crisis should be undertaken by the House of Commons defence committee, then chaired by former cabinet minister Sir Humphrey Atkins (Con, Spelthorne). The committee announced its inquiry in January 1986. The inquiry obviously touched on the activities not only of the Ministry of Defence but also the Department of Trade and Industry and the Law Officers’ Department. The leader of the House, John Biffen (Con, North Shropshire) consulted closely with the chairman of the liaison committee, Terence Higgins (Con, Worthing) to ensure that the relationship between the defence committee, other select committees and Whitehall was managed smoothly, but there were suggestions, which were headed off by the government, that the prime minister appear as a witness.
The liaison committee has been chaired over the years by a combination of sitting committee chairs and those who do not chair (but may previously have chaired) a select committee. It was initially (1979-83) chaired by Edward du Cann (Con, Taunton) who was not only chair of the Treasury and Civil Service committee but also of the 1922 committee. From 1983 to 1997, the chair was Terence Higgins, mentioned above, who was also, like du Cann, chair of the Treasury and Civil Service committee 1983-92; in 1997 he was succeeded by Robert Sheldon (Lab, Ashton-under-Lyne), the chair of the standards and privileges committee. In 2001, the position was taken by Alan Williams (Lab, Swansea West), who, for the first time, was not chair of a select committee (nor had he been) but did head the public accounts commission, a separate body from the public accounts committee, which meets infrequently and supervises the National Audit Office. From 2010 to 2015, liaison was chaired by Sir Alan Beith (LD, Berwick-upon-Tweed), and Andrew Tyrie (Con, Chichester), again chair of the Treasury committee, took over from 2015 to 2017. He was replaced by Dr Sarah Wollaston (Con, Totnes), chair of the health committee, who served from 2017 to 2019.
The current chair of the committee is Sir Bernard Jenkin (Con, Harwich and North Essex). He was appointed in May 2020, after a five-month interregnum while all the other committee chairs were put in place, and after a wrangle over his suitability for the role. Sir Bernard is not currently a committee chair himself, but ran the public administration and constitutional affairs committee from 2010 to 2019. Although non-chairs had held the position before, none had done so since chairs began to be elected by the House, rather than chosen by the whips (and, formally, by committees themselves) in 2010. He was also seen as too supportive of the government, an accusation which could never plausibly have been levelled at his two Conservative predecessors, Tyrie and Wollaston (I disliked both, but that is a personal view and for another time).
Is the liaison committee a suitable and appropriate body to scrutinise the prime minister? It is, as I noted above, a large and clumsy body at its full size; conversely, and ironically, it has often struggled to muster a quorum for meetings dealing with routine administrative issues. The members are therefore grand, with all the self-perception that entails, and they also do not have the same sense of collegiality which most committees develop due to frequent working together. However, apart from creating a special, smaller, separate select committee de novo to cross-examine the prime minister, I cannot see a more plausible forum in which the premier could be quizzed. My former colleague Dr Hannah White, director of the Institute for Government and a highly intelligent and politically attuned Westminster operator, had written an excellent defence of the liaison committee’s role.
That is not to say that the current arrangements are utterly ineffective. The committee’s scrutiny is extensive and rigorous—within the time constraints of the prime ministerial diary, which frequently can allot only 90 minutes or so for an appearance—and it is certainly a very useful complement to the more immediate but less penetrating process of PMQs. But changes could be made which might represent incremental gains.
In 2016, three academics, Dr Mark Bennister, Dr Alexandra Kelso and my former colleague in the House, Dr Philip Larkin, produced a paper on the effectiveness of the liaison committee. They broadly endorsed the effectiveness of the then-current arrangements, but made four principal recommendations for change. One, obviously, is for the prime minister to be questioned more frequently than the current three sessions a year, and I would endorse that. Downing Street argues that diary commitments make this difficult, and responded by suggesting that PMQs would not be held in those weeks when the prime minister appeared at the liaison committee. I would push back strongly against that. The prime minister will always have competing demands on his time, but it is a matter of prioritisation, and in that calculation, scrutiny by the democratically elected house of Parliament should rank extremely highly. I am not convinced that as many as six appearances a year would be excessive, and if that means that other commitments have to be declined, that is unfortunate but should not be decisive.
The second recommendation, “greater purpose”, reflected criticisms that the sessions with the prime minister could be vague and ill-defined, with some members saying they didn’t really what the purpose of them was. I am wholly in agreement that a more detailed structure, with specific areas for questioning and suggested outcomes, would be an advantage, and I certainly sympathise with the observation that the liaison committee, responsible for select committee best practice, would do well to exemplify this and provide rigorous, organised and systematic inquiry with adequate briefing for members to help them understand what the committee as a body corporate wants to achieve from the opportunity to examine the prime minister. That is an internal matter for the committee and its staff, but is certainly both desirable and achievable.
Third is the suggestion of “more effective questioning”. Here I am cautious, as this seems to me akin to telling members just to be better at their jobs. It has also been my experience that Members of Parliament are not always susceptible to criticism, however constructively intended, reasoning—and this is not utterly without foundation—that they have campaigned successfully and been elected to the Commons, and carry out duties every day which encompass forensic examination and the pursuit of inquiries. There are dozens of companies which make their living by training witnesses to appear in front of select committees, but training the members of the committee is a different matter. That said, over the past 15 years, I know that some select committees have agreed to undergo training, and in some cases have been receptive and grateful for it. So perhaps this is something which could be systematised and made generally available to MPs, but the liaison committee could also be encouraged to try it. I would leave this to the discretion and initiative of individual committee clerks: partly because clerks know their own members best, but also if it is imposed from “outside” (MPs are hazy on the wider structure of officialdom, and will therefore see it merely in terms of “otherwhere”) it could undermine the authority of the clerk as the captain of his or her own ship. In short, though, if this can be done, of course it would be helpful and constructive.
The fourth recommendation was “increased focus by members”, which seems closely tied to “greater purpose” and deals with the same obstacles. As I alluded to before, members of the liaison committee have only one thing in common, that they all (save the chair) are chairs of committees. They may not have close relationships, they may even dislike each other, and they may—perhaps will—have radically different agendas in terms of policy focus, career aspirations, preferred working methods and appetite for work. There is some work which the liaison committee’s secretariat can do with regard to preparation of more carefully and clearly structured briefing, both written and oral, but some attention should be paid to a kind of “socialisation” process among members.
This is a delicate and difficult matter. Many a committee clerk has carefully arranged a group event or away day only to be sabotaged by poor attendance, lack of attention and a disinclination to engage. This touches upon one of my most strongly held views about working for a select committee: while members of the secretariat will devote most or all of their working week to committee matters, the MPs will bring forthcoming meetings into mental focus only shortly before they take place, and will consider it only a small part of their duties. In truth, most members, it is fair to say, will not rank it very highly at all. Chairs, of course, especially now they are paid, may deem the committee one of their top, say, three priorities and engage and prepare accordingly; equally, there will be a leavening of members who are, from individual or policy motivation, find committee work one of their preferred, interesting and important tasks.
I have said this before elsewhere but it bears repetition: never underestimate how many MPs serve on committees under sufferance, as a favour for the whips or as part of a trade-off for something else. In my early years in the House, I was lucky. My first two committees, health and defence, comprised members who were on the whole enthusiastic about the subject and the operation of the committee, and I had chairs who jollied the members along when necessary. On the health committee we had a number of former (indeed, serving) clinicians of various kinds, while the chair was lay member of the General Medical Council; on defence we had former service personnel, those with longstanding intellectual interests in defence and security, and some with significant constituency connections to the defence world. The chair of the committee, James Arbuthnot (now Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom), was a former minister for defence procurement and remembered his ministerial appearances in front of the committee’s predecessors.
Not all committees are so fortunate. It would, I think, be invidious to name specific committees, but some struggle badly for enough nominations to fill all the places available, or at least find the necessary party balance difficult to achieve, and it is inevitable that pressed men will not carry out their duties as well as volunteers. Furthermore, MPs who are reluctant attenders will be parsimonious with their time or simply not turn up at all. (Members who miss a certain percentage of committee meetings can now be reported to the speaker by the chair, but it is not certain that this will lead to swift action, it will be a source of awkwardness if it comes to nothing and an MP who doesn’t want to be there may not regard removal from the committee as much of a punishment.)
Nevertheless, the liaison committee must try to instil in its members a sense of a collegiate existence and a higher level of buy-in into the committee’s activities. Perhaps informal activities like away days, relaxed planning sessions and engagement with interesting experts will help build that spirit. There are always public policy theorists and practitioners willing to advise select committees, even informally and without cost, especially if they can then add the role to their CVs. So long as they don’t try to take over and are relaxed about their advice not always being taken or implemented in the way they intended, these will be useful buttresses for the committee’s activities. All sorts of groups would offer something: academics, former officials, legal, economic and technical experts, even—if I can say this—journalists and commentators, as well as other media professionals. MPs like to feel supported and cosseted, they like to feel that eminent people are deferring and paying court to them, and I have never found a lack of willing volunteers.
Another area which must improve is interaction with the news media. Here I pay tribute to the House Service, as the support provided to committees has improved by light years since my early days. When I joined the House in 2005, the Committee Office (now the Select Committee Team, a name I don’t much like but I’m nostalgic) had, I think, four or five media officers available to it, with three or four each being responsible for a group of eight or nine committees. Their leadership was frankly weak and ineffective, and while some were very able and hard-working, others were… well, let us say “not” and leave it at that. The Select Committee Media and Communications Team now has much better resources and, I think, much better individuals, led by an experienced and capable director of communications and engagement. I am under no illusions that some select committee work is still unappetising to a media which has innumerable calls on its attention, and I have seen media officers gamely trying to drum up interest in the latest report from the committees on arms export controls (one of my old bailiwicks) or the recommendations of the communities and local government committee on the provision of public toilets (yes, this genuinely happened, in 2008, and the report opened with the bold gambit “Lavatory humour is rife in British culture, but the provision of public toilets is no laughing matter”).
I would also say gently that, while many may dismiss it as a forlorn hope, the liaison committee must up its game in terms of social media. It does have a Twitter account but it is neither dynamic nor particularly active and this is a missed opportunity (as far as I know it has no presence on Instagram or TikTok); there must be eager digital natives in the secretariat or further afield in the House Service who would love the opportunity to take on the challenge of boosting the committee’s profile.
An evidence session with the prime minister, however, should be rich fare for journalists, but the secretariat and its media support must make the most of this: not only secure extensive coverage of the session itself, but use it to emphasise the role of the liaison committee in general, create news-friendly lines of questioning on relatable and relevant issues and show more widely how this fits into the process of scrutiny of the government and how this is an ongoing and joined-up process, encouraging individual committees to draw on it and connect it to the work of the chamber and matters arising in legislation.
This is all doable. It will require hard work, innovation, ingenuity and organisation, but I never found my colleagues in the House of Commons lacking in that. It was one of my most satisfying experiences as a parliamentary official that I worked with some exceptional people with a broad range of skills, high intelligence and often a gift for improvisation and seeing round corners. It would also strengthen scrutiny of the prime minister, which is a good thing in principle, and, if it goes well, would create a virtuous circle in which members saw more clearly what they were doing and why, and so be more enthusiastic and engaged in the process. It stops short of a complete revolution in the liaison committee or an attempt to reinvent the wheel, and, helpfully, could play in to the government’s more general efforts to restore public faith and trust in our political institutions, something with the current leader of the House holds dear and is touring the country to promote.
Scrutinising the prime minister and his work matters. It is not a substitute for the regular scrutiny of individual departments, which is done quite well, but it is the prime minister who sets the government’s strategic direction and is responsible for its ideological and philosophical framework. He is also, with no disrespect to the Foreign Office, the chief representative of the UK to the rest of the world. PMQs is imperfect but is a powerful brand which, relatively speaking, draws in the crowds, while the liaison committee undertakes less crowd-pleasing but more detailed and coordinated scrutiny. Changes are needed but they are not revolutionary nor are they dauntingly time-consuming or resource-heavy. It needs clarity of thought and fixity of purpose, but if the House can do it, then everyone wins, even the government. Improving our democracy will not be achieved by a big bang, but by the pursuit of marginal gains. But it has to be done, so let’s get on with it.