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PMQs - The Verdict
Andrew Alexander
Prime minister's questions is the Commons session when a good degree of tribal booing is indulged, but this week MPs - particularly on the Labour benches - were unusually full-throated.
It may be that ongoing knocks over expenses, and his continued presence in the newspapers, left Speaker Michael Martin feeling out of sorts.
Whatever the reason, he did less than usual to quell the chamber, intervening only once during a long exchange between Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
Whether, as Iain Duncan Smith told ePolitix.com afterwards (audio file), this was organised support for the prime minister, Cameron found the going heavier than in recent weeks.
The Conservative leader used all of his stock of six questions on Wednesday morning's report by the Financial Services Authority, which owned up to failing to properly regulate Northern Rock.
Cameron called it "remarkable", and blamed the prime minister - the FSA is part of what is known as the tripartite system of banking regulation set up by Brown when he gave the Bank of England its independence back in 1997.
Brown was dismissive; the problems of other banks around the world such as Bear Stearns in the US proved the government line that the British crisis was down to the global credit crisis, not Labour's handling of the economy, he said.
Brown rather cheekily referred to a Tory press release put out earlier this week meant to support their case that the cost of living is rising under Labour, but which also evidently acknowledged that real living standards among some groups were rising.
Resisting Cameron's invitation to "make one more U-turn" and give the Bank of England a beefed-up role, Brown quoted thriller writer Frederick Forsyth, recently appointed chairman of a Tory commission on the military covenant.
Forsyth, an old-school Tory and sometime critic of the Cameroon leadership, wrote in a letter to a newspaper last year that "young David seems to have a pretty sketchy grasp of basic arithmetic".
Brown loved this new find, so much so he repeated it several times. Cameron responded by saying it was "frankly pathetic to listen to the prime minister of the United Kingdom read out quotes from a novelist when he ought to be reading from the Financial Services Authority report".
This, as Brown well knows, is the problem with hiring outside talent - they have not spent their career showing the same circumspection as a party animal.
Cameron repeatedly asked Brown to name one other major country that has just introduced a budget putting up taxes. Brown disputed the suggestion that they were rising, and compared the positive aspects of the current economic climate to the recession under the Tories in the early 1990s.
Black Wednesday is a favourite riff of the prime minister's, because Cameron was working for chancellor Norman Lamont at the time.
This was not lost on Northern Ireland secretary Shaun Woodward, who was nodding along from his seat next to Brown, apparently forgetting that in 1992 he was the Conservative Party's director of communications.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg also raised the spectre of the "Tory recession", but said that homeowners were facing similar conditions now.
Brown is always dismissive of "the Liberals", but this week could not even conjure up any civility, and Clegg struck a far more statesmanlike tone when he asked "is complacency the only thing he has to offer?".
The chamber may also have been rather frisky this week because MPs were looking forward to a visit from French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who was making a joint statement to both houses later on Wednesday.
A good few members referred to the state visit, but the prize for most frivolous contribution - and best French - went to europhile Denis MacShane, for his appeal to replace derision of the French with an "entente fraternal".
The Verdict
Gordon Brown: 5/10 - Held sway in the chamber, but only thanks to his vocal backbenchers
David Cameron: 6/10 - The stronger debater, but failing to get under the prime minister's skin
Nick Clegg: 6/10 - Chose a subject, house prices, which sounds 'outside the beltway'
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Published: Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:20:56 GMT+00
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