Bore draw at PMQs

Watching Gordon Brown and David Cameron clash during Prime Minister’s Question Time is unedifying at the best of times and, as everyone knows, these are anything but the best of times. Watching Cameron trying to adopt the right tone in the current financial crisis is like watching a drunk trying to regain his footing after losing his balance on an icy pavement... every time he finds himself upright, the momentum that got him there begins to bring him down again.

Initially Cameron’s approach was to signal his intention to adopt a non-partisan posture because the severity of the crisis required political unanimity. Cynical observers thought this was a ploy to appear statesmanlike and to avoid accusations of opportunism if he overtly criticised the Government. But any hope he could watch passively from the sidelines as negative public opinion engulfed Gordon Brown has proved seriously wide of the mark. Perversely, the crisis appears to have given Brown’s public standing a boost and Cameron’s dignified support did not achieve the result he was seeking.

This created a dilemma for the Leader of the Opposition... would the cost of reneging on his promise to adopt a non-partizan approach be greater or lesser than the cost of watching his party’s lead in the poll drizzle away as the Prime Minister was seen as the sole provider of ideas and solutions? Cameron has plainly decided that there are no votes in dignified support and in today’s PMQs, he gave the strongest signal yet that it was politics as normal regardless of the gravity of the circumstances.

Sadly, this resulted in an entirely unproductive exchange between Cameron and Brown in which the former accused the latter of breaking commitments on Government borrowing and the latter accused the former of inconsistency because he had previously acknowledged that greater Government borrowing was now inevitable. It was a tetchy and pointless debate that hung entirely on the strange importance politicians place on never being seen to adapt to circumstances... something the rest of us regard as pretty sensible.

As ever, the rules of PMQs defined the emphasis of the exchange... Cameron saved the soundbite he and his advisors wanted on the news bulletins for his sixth and final question and Brown reserved his most dismissive remark for his sixth answer when he knows there is no opportunity for a comeback from Cameron because he is not allowed a seventh answer. In truth, both men looked mightily relieved to reach the end of the exchange suggesting that they too are aware of the pointlessness of it all.