PMQs sketch: Robotic performances, but Miliband finds a weak spot
Miliband has finally found a way to bring Cameron’s evasiveness to mainstream attention, but not necessarily to keep us awake.
By Ian Dunt
They were like actors who were finally sick of playing their part. David Cameron and Ed Miliband went through the motions today, the odd bit of bellicose bluster only partially concealing the tedium of a grey Wednesday afternoon in Westminster.
Miliband started, as he always does, with a quick, sarcastic little question. “Following the Liberal Democrat conference at the weekend, is the prime minister planning any new amendments to his health bill?” Cameron had barely got up to speak before being met with a wall of Labour outrage. He promptly evaded the question, as he always does, saying there had already been a few changes to the bill.
Miliband, as he has done at every PMQs since he started, screeched with outrage. “Let’s give him another go at answering the question I asked,” he warned. Cameron replied by – again! – banging on about pre-scripted questions. “The problem with pre-scripted questions is it doesn’t give you the opportunity to respond to the first answer,” Cameron said.
Miliband replied, drolly: “He’s really got to get away from these pre-scripted answers.” The irony, of course, is that it’s only because Cameron constantly bangs on about pre-scripted questions that Miliband was able to pre-script his joke. It was a small moment of inspiration for Miliband, in between a desert of tried and tested attacks. Moments later he was quoting the prime minister’s pre-election statements on the NHS, ending with an attack he used on his first PMQs outing: “I agree with what the prime minister used to say, why doesn’t he?”
By the end of the session Miliband was chanting that old mantra “you can’t trust the Tories with the NHS” while Cameron accused Miliband of backing “every trade union”. It had become so robotic and habit-induced that the two men were slowly being sucked back to the 1980s. I half expected someone to mention Militant Tendency.
But inbetween the noisy tedium something a little bit important happened. Cameron’s evasiveness had got the better of him, and Miliband exploited it to ruin him on details. “Will he confirm that this bill makes healthcare subject to EU competition law for the first time in history?” Miliband asked.
Cameron desperately evaded, making a lame point about how Miliband sounded like Gordon Brown. He then extensively misquoted John Healey, to little avail and with no connection to the matter at hand. For perhaps the first time, Cameron’s evasiveness went mainstream. Everyone recognises that he evades answers, but most hacks enjoy his style at PMQs and overlook it. At this point, it all became too much to ignore. Cameron overstepped the mark.
“Talk about pre-scripted answers again. Why doesn’t he answer the question?” Miliband replied, in genuine surprise and exasperation. “Does he even know whether the health service will now be subject to EU competition law?” Suddenly the Labour leader did a quick line-by-line criticism of a section of the bill. By the end he looked almost authoritative while Cameron appeared stern and unhappy. Clegg – tellingly – was as vocal as any Tory backbenchers, unlike his party, which sat half-dead, rigid with despair.
Miliband had found an angle. Once he countered Cameron’s evasiveness with detail it became much more evident. Will it work on the evening news? No. But political journalists notice it, and it affects their perception of events. Outside the chamber, the usual huddle around the prime minister’s spokesman was twice as large as usual. When he had no answers on EU competition law, half the congregation walked away, unimpressed.
