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Richard Heller: Let's have a Commons question time for David Cameron
IMAGINE a cricket match in which one side bowls all the time and the other side bats. There will be flurries of excitement – wickets to the bowlers, boundaries from the batsmen. But the match itself will be boring and meaningless, and the spectators (if any) will have no idea who is the better side.
This is a fair comparison with Prime Minister's Questions – supposedly the high point of Parliament's week. David Cameron, as the Opposition leader, does nothing but bowl.
He gets an over of six questions at Gordon Brown, who is at the batting crease. He chooses the line and length of each delivery and its pace and style. Gordon Brown bats them away (or more usually, pads them away). At the end of the over, each side claims to have won.
This ritual makes for poor sport and weakened democracy. It is time that David Cameron faced the bowling.
The leader of the Opposition is an office of state, clearly recognised as such in Britain's otherwise shambolic constitution, and paid for by the taxpayer.
The payment was first made to Clement Attlee in 1937. According to the great historian AJP Taylor, it was a reward for his bipartisan role in the Abdication crisis. "He stood by the constitution: in exchange the constitution recognised him." But the Leader of the Opposition is almost totally unaccountable to Parliament or the British people. If Gordon Brown or other MPs even try to ask a question about his policies or any other aspect of his leadership, they are ruled out of order.
This situation should end. MPs should have the right to question the alternative Prime Minister.
Parliament should therefore introduce Opposition Leader's Question Time to match Prime Minister's Questions. For half an hour each week, David Cameron should face questions about any issue for which he has some responsibility as Leader of the Opposition – whether it is Conservative policies, or finances, or the conduct of the party's representatives in Parliament, or anything else which is likely to influence public judgment on his ability as the alternative premier.
It would be a mirror-image of Prime Minister's Questions, except in one respect. I do not think that the public would want to see Gordon Brown – or any future Prime Minister – given a full over against the Opposition Leader. I believe that he should be given only the first two balls. The remaining four would be given to other Government MPs. (In present circumstances, that would help the Labour Party to discover if anyone else could land any useful blows against David Cameron). All other would-be questioners would go into a ballot, as with Prime Minister's Questions.
What about the other opposition party leaders? Should they get their own little Question Times? No. It may sound unfair, but they do not hold offices of state and they are not treated as alternative Prime Ministers.
Opposition Leader's Question Time will no doubt attract all the faults of Prime Minister's Question Time. There will be more fatuous bluster, more pre-prepared toadies and more leaden-footed wit (it has been rightly said that "a Commons joke is no laughing matter"). But this new Question Time would freshen up Parliament and show voters things they do not now know about David Cameron. Is he quick on his feet? Can he stand up to tough questions? Is he on top of all the issues that could be thrown at him without warning?
For this reason the change would be much fairer to David Cameron. The present asymmetrical system of questions casts him regularly as a carping critic and a lightweight. It gives him no chance to showcase the many meticulous and detailed alternative policies he has prepared, especially on the economy. His own Question Time could show whether he has the making of a Prime Minister – and the other parties would have their shot at proving that he has not.
This has been a catastrophic few weeks for Parliament – and there are more stories of bad behaviour to come. More than ever, MPs have a duty to create some new motive for people to take a healthy interest in Parliament. This reform would be one way to do it – and there is no excuse for the usual faffing around with commissions of inquiry, or Speaker's Conferences, or discussions through "the usual channels". The Government controls most of the time in the Commons – and it has given the House a very light workload.
It could easily afford to give half an hour of Government time each week for Questions to the Oppos-ition Leader. It would be an offer David Cameron could not refuse.
Combined with televised election debates – for which I have also called in this newspaper – Opposition Question Time would be a service to voters. The Parliamentary cricket match would at last have a winner:
British democracy.
Richard Heller is a political writer and former adviser to Denis Healey.
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Tuesday 22 May 2012
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