Punch and Judy Politics by Ayesha Hazarika

Author:Ayesha Hazarika [Ayesha Hazarika & Tom Hamilton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785903588
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2018-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

Blair is forensic, using a simple, logical structure: two questions about the Prime Minister’s position, and a third and final question which is not really a question at all, summing up Major’s answers and contrasting them with the answers he says he can give, as Labour leader, to the same two questions. One simple question on one. A prepared rejoinder and another simple question on two. A summary of the exchange and a political attack on three. The words ‘Weak, weak, weak’ at the heart of the final intervention (Hansard has a fourth ‘weak’: that was later, quieter, after a long pause). It’s focused, brutal stuff.

Major’s answers don’t do a lot wrong. In response to a basic Labour attack that he has no authority over his own MPs on the issue of Europe, he points out, with evidence, a) that there are Labour MPs who do not agree with Blair’s stance on the issue, and b) that Blair himself had disagreed with his party’s European policy in 1983. Quite simply, says Major, Blair’s attack on the Conservatives applies equally well to Labour.

It doesn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t work, as so often at PMQs, has less to do with PMQs itself and more to do with the wider political context. Major, by this point, was widely seen as a weak leader who could not control his party. Blair was widely seen as a strong leader, exerting authority over his. If those public perceptions had been reversed but the same questions and answers given, Blair’s attack would have fallen flat and Major’s response would have resonated. The power of Blair’s line of questioning derives from this pre-existing dominant narrative, but it also dramatises it, in a concise form that can be replayed again and again on television and radio, in just three words.

(You could boil down the whole of the run-up to the 1997 election to two Blair soundbites, each consisting of one word repeated three times. On the positive side, dramatising Labour’s agenda for government contrasted with the Tories’ neglect of public services, ‘education, education, education’; on the attack side, dramatising the Tories’ unfitness for office contrasted with Blair’s firm leadership of a united party, ‘weak, weak, weak’.)

Blair’s other biggest PMQs moment in opposition, almost two years earlier in April 1995, was also based on the contrast between his and Major’s leadership, as Alastair Campbell recounted in his diary:

I had worked out a line of attack which TB improved by watching the news for once and said why aren’t the interviewers asking if the Tory rebels have given a guarantee that they will support the government in future votes on Europe. That became the question and then we rehearsed a line to use if Major came back at him with our own divisions – I lead my party, he follows his – which turned out to be the biggest blow TB had yet landed at PMQs, which produced a massive cheer on our side and a look of real pain on theirs.

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