Didn’t she do well?
Yes, says Michael White.
Yes, says Iain Dale.
Yes, says James Macintyre
Yes, says Steve Richards
Yes, says Andrew Grice
Yes, says Sam Coates
Yes, says Andrew Gimson
To be honest, I think Andrew Gimson had it about right when he said “Harriet Harman did much better than expected when she stood in for Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s questions. This is not the highest praise: expectations were very low indeed.”The expectations were, I think, foolishly low. Harriet is a QC; admittedly, she practiced as a solicitor rather than a barrister, but she is no slouch when it comes to thinking on her feet. While William Hague is an adept debater, he came into this as the favourite. Everyone was expecting him to tear into Harriet and so anything less would have been a victory for Harman. As it happened, it was a scoring draw against Hague & Cable and a win against the rest, including a couple of tap-ups from John Spellar (Lab, Warley) and Charles Walker (Con, Broxbourne), so it was reported as a convincing win for Harman.
She seemed generally well-prepared - the pre-written one-liner on Hague’s baseball cap went down well - and had answers ready when she didn’t know the answer, essentially that a colleague would write with up-to-date information. As an aside, I believe that in the past, questions to the PM excluded anything that fell within a secretary of state’s remit. I do wonder if a return to that practice wouldn’t improve PMQs.
xD.
