Guardian: The history of PMQs

The Guardian today features a lengthy and interesting overview of the House of Commons institution known as Prime Minister's Questions—turning only 50 years old this week:

Everyone hates prime minister's question time. At least they often say they do. How much they mean it is another matter. In its current form (more or less) PMQs has now survived 50 years, almost exactly as long as Private Eye, another great national institution routinely accused of not being what it used to be.

Backbench MPs arrive at Westminster determined not to join in the gladiatorial shouting match their constituents say they so dislike. Then they see old hands on the other side cheering their own leader for a good retort and loyalty kicks in. Voters? They deplore schoolboy antics, but complain whenever lapses into sobriety, let alone statesmanship, make PMQs look like an elite fix or, worse, boring.

The media? Its collective lip curls too. But (as with MPs) the 30-minute session at noon on Wednesdays is the one time in the week when watching the Commons chamber on TV monitors from their desks isn't enough. Reporters pile into the press gallery, 24/7 TV analyses the run of play like a Premier League grudge match. Editors wait for a good soundbite to enliven the six o'clock news.

As for the gladiators themselves, without exception they all claim to dislike it too, even Margaret Thatcher, who regularly made mincemeat of opponents across the dispatch box, but not all of them. Jim Callaghan, Labour's hugely experienced prime minister from 1976-1979, usually worsted the rookie opposition leader. But in doing so in more chauvinistic times "Sunny Jim" prompted the commentator Hugo Young – no Thatcher fan – to protest that he was offensively condescending.

Callaghan regarded what was then the twice-weekly session, at 3.15pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as "a complete waste of time". His predecessor, Harold Wilson, once master of the joust, fortified himself in advance with a brandy or two during his later years. Tony Blair, another PMQs champ in his prime, admitted at his final appearance in 2007 that he had always feared the Commons.

"This is still the arena that sets the heart beating a little faster. And, if it is on occasions the place of low skulduggery, it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes," Blair told MPs before they rose – Tory MPs included – and clapped him out of the chamber where he had dominated and infuriated for a decade in power.

As for Harold Macmillan, on the dusty pages of old volumes of Hansard his words still convey the unflappable urbanity which was the trademark style of "SuperMac". The shy, earnest young MP of the 1920s had been utterly transformed by private adversity (a fraught marriage), decades of hard work and growing self-confidence. PMQs, he once confided, still made him feel "physically sick". Yet this is what he wrote in his private diary a few weeks after succeeding the hopeless Sir Anthony Eden in the Westminster debacle that followed the collapse of Britain's last imperial venture, the Suez invasion of 1956:

"I didn't worry ... I didn't mind even losing a by-election or bother too much with the outside world, if you can once impress upon the House of Commons that the government is strong and the prime minister is in control ... then gradually it begins to go out into the country as the members go back to their constituencies."

In the age of a televised parliament, where PMQs is a niche market (very popular on the US cable channel CSpan) and TV panels instantly score the leaders' performance, that leisurely transmission mechanism has long gone. But an instant-death X Factor version is still recognisable. PMQs remains a test of character, stamina and grasp of policy, as well as a chance for voters to judge whether the party leaders understand their lives and are real human beings – not geeks or mere technocrats. Gordon Brown's inability to master quick-witted cut and thrust did him harm when he succeeded Blair. His evident scorn for David Cameron was not enough.

A ready wit, not dependent on scripted made-for-TV soundbites, is a bonus, but not compulsory, as Thatcher showed. Michael Foot and William Hague were both very witty opposition leaders. Foot was loved, Hague's brainpower respected by the colleagues. It was not enough. Voters gave them the thumbs-down well before their landslide defeats on polling day in 1983 and 2001.

So the occasion is fraught with ambiguity. Neil Kinnock, who had the unenviable task of facing Thatcher (far more condescending than Callaghan ever was) in her pomp for nine years, told the Guardian this week that, yes, "PMQs is over-rated, but it's permanent and part of the territory. It has to be done. In some ways our parliamentary democracy is more testing than others.''

Even a sceptic like Kinnock acknowledges that it requires "hours and hours of preparation", which means that the prime minister will know more detail about policy across Whitehall than might otherwise be the case. Thatcher, who once scornfully remarked that many of her EU colleagues barely knew where their parliaments were, prided herself in detailed knowledge – "from some local hospital to a great international issue".

"Each department was naturally expected to provide the facts and a possible reply on points that might arise. It was a good test of the alertness and efficiency of the cabinet minister in charge of the department whether information arrived late – or arrived at all; whether it was accurate, wrong, comprehensible or riddled with jargon," she wrote in her memoirs.

Few prime ministers have been as driven or domineering as Thatcher, none since Churchill in his wartime supremacy. Even during a war the pace was more leisurely than the globally wired world of 2011. Before the 1880s MPs asked questions of ministers without prior notice before the start of the daily agenda, with the PM treated no differently from any other minister.

As a gesture to Gladstone (then 72) his questions were placed at the end of the list in 1881 to allow him to arrive late. But that meant they were rarely reached. In 1904 they were answered only when questions – ever more were being asked – reached No 51; after 1940, they were addressed at No 45, a procedure that survived until 1953 when PMQs were restricted to Tuesdays and Thursdays only to assist the ailing Churchill (78). Even then several cabinet ministers were still expected to be around to answer questions every day as they had been 100 years before: old-fashioned accountability, but time-consuming. Nowadays each team does up to an hour once a month.

In the early days, exchanges were more succint. Back on 6 June 1904 the Tory philosopher-PM Arthur Balfour took four questions, mostly about imperial defence (Germany was menacing), but usually replied that it would serve "no public object" if he shared his thoughts; or that it would take a whole speech to reply; or that the war minister had already covered the point.

By June 1948, not much had changed. Then it was the opposition's deputy leader who asked Labour's prime minister, the famously terse Clement Attlee, for a statement on the London dock strike on five successive days – and got one too in brief exchanges over five or six minutes (today such an exchange would last half an hour).

It did not stop Labour's Bessie Braddock accusing Attlee of "complacency" over the strike. Rudeness and rowdiness is nothing new. MPs could be bitchy without the stimulus of TV, which makes for more noise and crafted soundbites but also has an inhibiting effect on more outrageous exhibitionism when MPs remember voters are watching. In 1961 another Labour troublemaker, Desmond Donnelly, rudely asked Macmillan if there had ever been another PM "so gorged on his own words". Yet when Tony Banks likened Hague to a foetus in the TV era most voters were not amused.

Backbenchers with a talent for PMQs are invaluable. Labour's Tam Dalyell's supplementary question once consisted of a devastating single word ("Why?") but the MP also had forensic skills, harrying Thatcher for months over the sinking of the Argentine cruiser Belgrano for months after the 1982 Falklands war. Leftwinger Dennis Skinner's timing for a witty heckle (waiting for a pause before shouting) could be brilliant. When Major first rose to take PMQs, Skinner shouted "Resign" before the new boy could utter a word. After Major later acquired lame-duck status Skinner would mutter: "Quack, quack." In opposition days, ambitious, articulate Tories such as Norman Tebbit and Alan Clark did the same service for Thatcher.

Personal grudges have always given an edge to PMQs. Macmillan despised Labour's then leader, Hugh Gaitskell, as a weak, priggish public school socialist. In return, Gaitskell thought him dishonest. But SuperMac admired Labour's next leader, the wily Harold Wilson, whose later demolition of Sir Alec Douglas-Home (1963-64) at PMQs paved the way for the left's return to power.

For his part, the grudge-minded Ted Heath despised Wilson as devious, just as Foot and Kinnock genuinely disliked Thatcher, who thought neither rival was up to the job. Blair thought the same about the Tory leaders he saw off: Hague, IDS and Michael Howard. Hague's wit and speed disconcerted him at first, but once he got a line on him (Hague had "good jokes, bad policies") Blair reasserted himself until Cameron arrived to tell him: "You were the future once."

By this time, the twice-weekly sessions at 3.15pm – instituted against some resistance in June 1961 and confirmed 50 years ago this week – had given way to Blair's once-weekly 30-minute joust at noon on Wednesdays, imposed without consultation. Alastair Campbell reckoned it saved the boss one-and-a-half days a week of prep. Though Blair denied it, most MPs think it makes a PM less accountable than before.

Kinnock (who found it awkward being aggressive towards an older woman) agrees. He also argues that the old convention that allowed an opposition leader three questions in each session (one to the Lib Dem leader) has wrongly morphed into six on Wednesdays, which is often too many. In the 60s opposition leaders often intervened only once – and late – in PMQs.

The fact is that like many things in Britain's fluid constitutional system, PMQs constantly adapts to new realities. Global affairs usually intrude less, social security and constituency worries feature more. So does Europe. Thatcher's cabinet feuds became a staple of PMQs and helped bring her down. So did Major's and the Blair-Brown feud. TV raises the stakes for both sides.

Similar fissures, magnified by rolling news in ways that would have baffled or alarmed Attlee or Balfour, may yet wreak havoc on the coalition. Cameron's critics have already noticed that beneath that urbane exterior (surely modelled on the Etonian Macmillan's style) there lurks a bullying tendency to resort to cheap shots ("Calm down, dear") when the going gets tough.

If voters come to see PMQs as a reprise of Flashman of the Bullingdon Club he may pay the familiar price of misjudging a loved-and-loathed national institution on which everyone has an opinion.

BBC Daily Politics: Advice for junior ministers

The BBC's Daily Politics program today featured a brief, yet insightful exploration of the role of the junior minister within government—a nice title, but with mixed blessings....

Revealed: How the City bankrolls the Tories

On the eve of the Tory conference this coming week, The Guardian website leads this morning with an exposé regarding Conservative Party funding... The central finding: donations from finance account for half of payments to Tories since 2010 general election:

The influence of the City over the Conservatives has been laid bare by new research showing that more than half of the Tory party's donations since the general election have come from individuals and businesses working in finance.

Hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms contributed more than a quarter of all the Tories' private donations – which this year poured in at a rate equal to £1m a month – the study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found.

The figures show an increase in the proportion of party funds coming from the financial sector, raising fears that the City's financial influence over the Tories is on the rise as key pieces of legislation are discussed by the coalition government.

They come amid growing concerns that some parts of the financial sector, described by Labour leader Ed Miliband this week as "asset strippers" or "predator financiers", are profiting from financial instability.

The senior Labour shadow minister Peter Hain said the figures confirmed that the Tories remain wedded to the few who do well out of the financial and political system. The Liberal Democrats used the research to step up their campaign for changes to party funding.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has mapped, for the first time, donations to the Tories from business to the year ending 30 June.

Using analysis from the Electoral Commission and Companies House databases, the researchers found City donations in the 12 months to July accounted for 51.4% of the £12.2m of funds received by Central Office. Hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms contributed £3.3m – 27% – while 50 City donors paid more than £50,000. All donors contributing this amount or more become members of the Leader's Group and qualify for a face-to-face meeting with the prime minister.

The largest contributor across all the business sectors studied by the bureau was hedge funds which donated £1.38m (11.4%). Three of the City's biggest name hedge fund bosses – Michael Farmer, Lord Stanley Fink and Andrew Law – together contributed £636,300. Fink is the party treasurer. The top financier donor was David Rowland, who contributed £1.1m. Rowland has a colourful City career and was forced to resign as party treasurer before he even took up the job because of links to tax havens. He now controls Banque Havilland – which used to be the crashed Icelandic Kaupthing bank business – in Luxembourg and the hedge fund Blackfish Capital Management.

Outside the City, the sector that donated most was industry, including manufacturing and defence. This sector contributed £913,411 (7.5%). A company controlled by Michael Spencer, another former Conservative party treasurer, donated £163,350. He is campaigning against the EU's attempts to introduce a transaction tax on financial trades and threatened on Fridayto shift some of his company's operations from London "extremely rapidly" if the tax was introduced.

Peter Cruddas, the multimillionaire currency trader who grew up on a Hackney housing estate and left school with no qualifications, handed over £123,600, while his business, CMC Markets UK, donated £100,000. He is co-treasurer of the Conservative party, alongside Fink.

But while Spencer and others are now campaigning against potential tax changes, since the coalition came to power several key measures have been introduced that could benefit the Conservative's City backers. Among them is a commitment to reduce corporation tax to 23% by April 2014 and exempting UK resident companies from corporation tax on all profits for their foreign branches.

The figures show the insurance sector has donated £189,400 as the government discusses radical plans to slash the legal aid budget – a measure which critics claim will benefit insurers. Construction companies have donated more than £220,000 amid a lobbying campaign to relax planning rules covering the green belt.

In a separate survey, the Labour MP John Mann disclosed figures that showed that the top three donors – Rowland, Farmer and Fink – had donated almost £10m since 2005. Stuart Wilks-Heeg, executive director of Democratic Audit, said: "What this study tellingly reveals is the scale of the Conservative party's reliance on a variety of City interests at a time when the Conservative-led government is attempting to kick banking reform into the long grass."

Hain said: "The Conservative party has long since been over reliant on donor income from people at the top of the income scale.

"No wonder David Cameron and George Osborne are straining at the leash to cut tax for people earning at least £150,000 a year while asking everyone else to pay the bill for a financial crisis caused by the banks," he said.

The Liberal Democrat peer Lord Oakeshott said: "Big financiers are still the Tories' big backers with hedge fund gamblers and private equity asset strippers leading the way. Labour is being bankrolled by the union bosses. The coalition must act now to clean up party funding."

The Guardian article concludes with an interesting roll of celebrity donors:

David Rowland, property developer: £1,160,936

Notoriously camera-shy, Rowland was by a distance the Conservatives' largest donor last year. The former tax exile was set to become party treasurer last year but resigned shortly before he was due to start.

Michael Bishop, former airline head: £335,000

Was one of the country's first openly gay senior executives when he headed BMI. Sold stake in airline to Lufthansa for £318m in 2008.

May Makhzoumi, fibreglass pipe manufacturing and supply business: £308,000

The biggest individual female donor. Wife of the Lebanese businessman Fouad Makhzoumi.

JCB Research, industrial equipment company: £300,000

Subsidiary of the Bamford family's JCB digger empire. JCB chairman Sir Anthony Bamford was nominated for a peerage by David Cameron last year, but withdrew his nomination.

David Whelan, fitness clubs & football club owner: £100,000

The founder of JJB Sports sold up in 2007, then later bought its fitness clubs. Also owns Wigan Athletic football club.

John Frieda, hairdresser: £50,000

Celebrity hairstylist with salons in London, New York, Los Angeles and Barbados. Sold his hair care products business to a Japanese corporation for £290m in 2002.

Jeremy Isaacs, private equity firm co-owner: £50,000

Left role as head of Lehman Brothers' European and Asian operations days before bank went bankrupt in 2008. Later co-founded private-equity group vehicle JRJ group.

Hans Rausing, ex-packaging tycoon: £49,000

Co-inherited Sweden's Tetra Pak group, the world's largest packaging production company, then sold out to brother Gad in 1995 for an estimated $7bn. Wife Marit also donated £49,000 last year.

Julian Fellowes, writer and actor: £40,000

Won an Oscar for his first Hollywood screenplay, Gosford Park, and created the hit ITV series Downton Abbey. Was made a Conservative peer in January.

Annabel's, private members restaurant & nightclub: £20,000

Legendary central London society haunt, frequented over the years by Frank Sinatra, Aristotle Onassis, assorted royals and David Blunkett.

Mike Batt, composer: £20,000

Composed such classics as Remember You're a Womble and the theme to Watership Down. Took over composing Tory election themes from Andrew Lloyd Webber and often donates in kind through music.

Bell Pottinger, PR group: £11,900

As representative for Trafigura, tried to prevent media revelations about the oil company's involvement in toxic waste dumping in Africa. Also represents the government in Bahrain.