A new low for PMQS

The weekly clashes at Prime Minister’s Questions have long produced more heat than light, with political point-scoring invariably taking precedence over elucidation. The exchanges with the Leader of the Opposition are especially purposeless as pre-prepared positions are trotted out and soundbites provided for the evening news bulletins.

When there were two 15-minute sessions of PMQS a week, there was a greater likelihood that topical matters would be raised and the prime minister put on the spot to answer. This procedure, first set down in 1961, was abandoned by Tony Blair in 1997 and has remained unchanged ever since.

As an example of how these events have descended into absurdity, we need look no further than yesterday’s PMQS. In the course of setting out a list of Sir Keir Starmer’s perceived shortcomings, the Prime Minister mentioned his apparent difficulty in defining a woman. Sir Keir has previously said that 99.9 per cent of women do not have penises.

The Labour leader affected great offence at this because the mother of the transgender teenager, Brianna Ghey, whose murderers were jailed last week, was in the chamber. Cries of “shame” arose from the Opposition benches.

Labour MPS demanded an apology; and yet it was their own leader who was shamelessly using the mother of a dead child to make a political point and divert legitimate scrutiny of his views. For Sir Keir to make out that the Prime Minister was somehow wilfully “using minorities as punch bags”, as a party spokesman put it later, is a new low even for PMQS. If there is an apology due, it is from the former director of public prosecutions.