This is the hidden power of PMQs: it doesn’t just make the Prime Minister accountable to Parliament, it also makes every minister and every department accountable to the Prime Minister. It extends Downing Street’s tentacles across Whitehall, giving it a legitimate pretext to know about everything that might be going wrong. (Location 381)
Labour’s 1997 manifesto contained the entirely opaque commitment: ‘Prime Minister’s Questions will be made more effective.’60 While this told voters nothing at all of any interest, Tony Blair had already decided what he wanted to do, and his landslide victory gave him the mandate to do it: he shifted the thirty minutes of PMQs from two fifteen-minute slots twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to one thirty-minute slot once a week, on Wednesdays. (Location 608)
But without each of the developments traced here, PMQs would be a very different beast. The permanent, fixed slot ensures time is carved out in the schedule for the Prime Minister to be held to account. The open questions give it its element of surprise and unpredictability. The willingness of the Prime Minister to answer any question, no matter what the subject, gives PMQs its powerful role in extending 10 Downing Street’s reach across Whitehall. The television cameras give PMQs, and its protagonists, an audience unparalleled by any other regular parliamentary occasion anywhere in the world. The primacy of the leaders’ duel gives the Leader of the Opposition a unique platform to make the case against the Prime Minister and advance an alternative vision – or to be exposed as inadequate. The extended run of six questions and answers for the two main contenders allows maximum opportunity for each to put their case in gladiatorial combat. (Location 716)
