Each week, the Pagefield panel give their take on PMQs. Here are this week's thoughts.
Great day for Red Tops? Ed Miliband would have been hoping so, as he prepared his lines for PMQs.
Coulson dominated, but Ed didn’t. The fact that Cameron should be in deep trouble over Coulson, but isn’t (yet), again shows the weakness of the Labour offer – Miliband and his increasingly exposed backroom team can’t connect the big political stories with the concerns of voters. His shrillest point (shrillness usually betraying what he hopes is his strongest argument) came when he declared: “the whole country will want to know the answer” to whether civil servants warned the PM off Coulson. How much of the country will actually care? How many have heard of Gus O’Donnell? I imagine not many (despite Labour’s best twitter efforts).
The fruit was hanging so low, that Ed really should have put his back out, but again he seemed to miss his chance. Cameron didn’t quite ‘totally disprove’ everything with evidence but his superior debating skills saw him through in the end, skilfully turning Miliband’s questions of leadership against the Labour premier and even managing to crowbar in ‘long term economic plan.’
For all his faults, Coulson was a boon to the Tory PR team (the irony). To evoke Harriet Harman, Cameron was right to hire him and right to apologise. PMQs was just the beginning: where this goes next is the real test of how muscular the parties attack and rebuttal teams are. Coulson pulled the Tories out of a rut (from 2007) and the Labour party are determined to use him to pull Cameron back into one.
Rory Cronin - Consultant
There has been much written in recent weeks about Ed Miliband missing ‘open goals’ – but in a week when it was revealed that the Prime Minister brought ‘a criminal into the heart of Downing Street’ there really is little excuse for not landing blows that can hurt his opposite number. The Leader of the Opposition did his best to don his QC robes and probe the timeline of the Prime Minister’s inaction on Coulson, but outside of his line on the ‘wilful negligence’ of the PM he couldn’t make anything stick.
The problem for Miliband is that his go-to line for assessing any government incompetence is to call for a judge-led public inquiry. He got his way on Leveson, but he did not get the result he wanted – as Cameron so revelled in highlighting today. As a consequence, he has handed the Prime Minister a perfect tool with which to bat away any criticisms of his conduct. When you deify judge-led inquiries to the extent that the Labour leader has, it completely binds your hands when wanting to criticise someone that the report has exonerated.
Miliband is also really struggling with his understanding of what the public care about when it comes to tabloid newspapers. Last week we saw his apology for holding a copy of The Sun, landing a pretty damning insult on its 2 million-plus working class readers, and today we heard him suggest that what the public really care about is whether the PM was advised by a Civil Servant on hiring a former tabloid editor. I would seriously question as to whether even triple figures of the public are concerned by this.
Miliband’s misfires aside, hats should be doffed to Cameron’s prep team – the PM will rarely have been as well-briefed as he was today and he seemed to relish his opposite number trying to set him up for a fall. The Labour Party campaign team will have had the verdicts of the Hacking Trial on their media grids for a very long time as a golden opportunity for easy wins – with a Prime Minister this slick in the face of a scandal (many on Twitter have noted remarkable similarities to Tony Blair today), it isn’t going to be as straightforward as they’d have hoped.
Sam Oakley - Executive
You can find a weekly summary of PMQs and other blog entries on the Pagefield website.