Another week, another ‘Better than expected’ from Brown

Yet another PMQs where Brown hasn’t been mauled, and commentators come away going ‘Hmm, he was better than usual there’. Except, of course, they are saying this every week now, at least for the past month.

Today Andrew Sparrow felt both leaders were below par, but Ben Brogan from the Mail says Brown did better than expected, and Andrew Grice from the Indy actually proclaimed it a Brown victory (and I’d be inclined to agree frankly).

At what point we’ll start expecting this as a minimum from Brown I don’t know. I guess given that some weeks he can in all honestly be quite dreadful, that will be expected and then anything above that (which happens about 80-90% of the time now) will be viewed as a bonus.

The problem is that PMQs really is all about the morale of your team, and if everyone goes in expecting poor performances, it will be that much harder to lift expectations and moral with a good performance. Hopefully Brown can keep up the quality of his recent good performances and we can see a bit more confidence in his MPs.

However to do so they’ll probably have to ignore the poll ratings for the next couple of years.

21/05/08 - PMQ’s - Brown edges it for me but he must try answer at least a couple of questions!

Well, I expected Brown to get a mauling today in an attempt by the Tories to really cement the momentum going into tomorrow’s by-election in Crewer & Nantwich. I hadn’t considered the issue of Burma and just expected Cameron to go straight into a 10p tax assault.

PMQ’s 23/04/08 - Opportunism Knocks

Prime Minister’s Question Time is probably one of the few times when it can be good to be a Leader of the Opposition. You can stand up, crack a few jokes, have everyone laugh sycophantically with you, insult the Prime Minister (and who gets to do that, to his face, every week?) and pretend to care about issues you have absolutely no history of taking an interest in.

Prime Minister’s Questions 23/4/08 - “Pre-Match Analysis”

My first post for the weekly sessions of Prime Ministers Questions, which Bruce Forsyth recently described as ‘pure vaudeville’. Not sure Gordon Brown would go for that but there you go.

23rd April 2008

 Since the last PMQ’s, pre-Easter recess, Labour and Gordon Brown in particular have got a right old kicking in the press. A few of the more sage journalists have pointed out that this often happens during recess as political hacks run out of things to say. Certainly the hysterical poll that said Gordon Brown is actually more unpopular than when Chamberlain appeased Adolf Hitler was a bit hard to take seriously.