Bernard Ingham: An opening round in the political punch-up

My portrayal of the encounter as some kind of Middle Ages joust in

the Westminster tiltyard will have a lot of people gnashing their teeth

and spitting blood. They harbour the fond hope of making this ritual more informative and constructive and certainly less aggressive. It is a nice idea.

It would be marvellous if PMs sometimes answered the question. It would literally be wonderful if they saw the occasion as No 10 talking seriously to the nation, imparting useful information – indeed, offering a tutorial for the populace.

It would also be confoundedly boring because it is not what PMQs

is about.

Of course, sometimes a question is tabled with the PM's foreknowledge to place information on record. But a fully functioning opposition is never inclined to play accommodating host to this laudable exercise. It is, after all, HM Loyal Opposition whose job is to oppose HM Government. It will therefore seek to disconcert the Prime Minister at every opportunity and preferably hoist him with his own petard.

Why do MPs sit opposite each other in the Palace of Westminster instead of in the ridiculous, hypocritical fantail of the European or Scottish Parliaments? More to the point, why are Government and Opposition benches set sword lengths apart?

The short answer to those who would emasculate the British Parliament is because we have an adversarial system of politics waged by words and ideas rather than fists and weapons. It is time we got used to the idea 49 years almost to the day since Harold Macmillan introduced the then twice-a-week 15-minute sessions.

So much then rode on them – and not much has changed – that Macmillan is reported to have felt physically sick before them. Whether we like it or not, PMQs are a major barometer of political morale. If the PM "wins", Government forces go home happy. If he does badly, the Opposition have their tails up.

Gordon Brown's plodding, humourless gaucheness at the dispatch box gave his party a weekly nightmare. In short, PMQs is war or, as von Clausewitz would have put it, politics by another means.

Preparations for this war are elaborate and, if Margaret Thatcher is any guide, Cameron and Ed Miliband will be closeted with their advisers for much of this morning before they go into bat. She started preparing for the next PMQs with an inquest in her Commons' room on her performance that day. How well had we identified the topics to be raised? Had her arguments played well? If not, why not? Could she have rehearsed a better knockdown? What mistakes must we not repeat?

All this after discussing my digest of the morning's newspapers for half an hour at 9am every day, reading briefs into the small hours of Tuesdays and Thursdays – there were still two PMQs a week in her day – being kept up to date with breaking news and polishing ripostes.

As Churchill put it, all the best impromptu rejoinders are rehearsed endlessly through the night.

Cameron's objective today must be to maintain his ascendancy over Miliband Minor and the House. The new Leader of the Opposition desperately needs to promise the PM plenty of roughhouses to come, even if on this first occasion he does not actually floor him.

The odds are on Cameron not ending up the "proper Charlie". But his position is not entirely comfortable. His coalition made a complete hash over trailing the withdrawal of child benefit as a universal element in the welfare system. The Liberal Democrats and the purer Conservatives regularly require stroking if they are to be

kept quiescent.

Ed Miliband will seek to try to drive chisels into coalition cracks to split it like a log. But he had better be careful. As if his own fratricide were not enough, all kinds of turbulent currents are still running strongly in the Labour Party as his composition of the Shadow Cabinet has confirmed.

Given he owes his election to the trade union movement and has one of its products as (a novice economist) Chancellor, Miliband simply cannot afford as a potential national leader to emerge as a throwback. He has already raised enough suspicions by rejecting as "abhorrent and cruel" the Tory idea that families should not have children if they cannot afford them and claimed that even millionaires should get child benefit.

Let t'battle commence.