The mainstream political press is trapped in a loop. Every Wednesday, Westminster journalists assemble to watch two politicians trade rehearsed insults across a dispatch box, only to spend the next six hours declaring a winner.
The recent clash between Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch following a high-profile frontbench resignation is the perfect case study in this collective delusion. The media frame was entirely predictable: Is Starmer losing control of his party? Can Badenoch capitalize on the chaos? Did the Prime Minister successfully defend his record?
This entire framing asks the wrong question. It assumes that PMQs is a barometer of political power or a mechanism of accountability. It is neither.
PMQs is an expensive, televised soap opera that actively obscures how a state functions. The obsession with theatrical performance at the dispatch box has created a political culture that prizes rhetorical agility over actual administrative competence. While the cameras capture the performative outrage, the actual machinery of government—policy implementation, civil service management, and legislative scrutiny—is left to decay in the dark.
The Illusion of Accountability
The central myth perpetuated by political commentators is that PMQs provides vital democratic accountability. We are told that forcing a Prime Minister to stand up and face questions for 30 minutes a week keeps the executive in check.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of power.
True accountability does not happen in a room full of shouting partisans waving order papers. True accountability happens in select committees, where MPs spend hours grilling civil servants and ministers over spreadsheets, impact assessments, and procurement data. It happens through the painstaking work of the National Audit Office.
PMQs, by contrast, is engineered to prevent accountability. The questions are rarely designed to extract information; they are designed to create a ten-second social media clip.
Opposition leaders ask multi-part, rhetorical questions intended to trap the Prime Minister into a soundbite. Prime Ministers respond with pre-scripted statistics or pivot to attacks on the opposition's previous record. No minds are changed. No policies are altered. No data is clarified.
I have watched political operations spend days preparing for these 30 minutes. Top civil servants and special advisors waste hundreds of collective hours anticipating lines of attack, drafting "defensive lines," and memorizing weaponized statistics. This is an immense drain on the intellectual resources of the state. Those hours should be spent fixing public services or optimizing supply chains. Instead, they are burned on the altar of weekly public relations.
The Myth of the Dispatch Box Performer
The media love to track the "momentum" of party leaders based on their PMQs performances. If an opposition leader lands a sharp blow, they are suddenly hailed as a Prime Minister in waiting. If a Prime Minister stumbles over an answer, their leadership is declared to be in terminal decline.
History shows this correlation is entirely artificial.
Consider the historical record. William Hague regularly skewered Tony Blair at the dispatch box during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hague was widely acknowledged by Westminster insiders to be a master of the format—witty, sharp, and devastating. The result? Blair secured consecutive landslide majorities while Hague never made it to Downing Street.
Conversely, Gordon Brown was widely criticized for his clunky, numbers-heavy, and uncharismatic performances at PMQs. Yet his actual management of the 2008 banking collapse—recapitalizing banks with public equity—became the blueprint used by global central banks to avert a total financial meltdown. The performance had nothing to do with the governance.
The skill set required to survive PMQs—quick wit, a thick skin, and the ability to pivot away from a direct question—is entirely distinct from the skill set required to run a complex modern state. A Prime Minister needs to understand systems, manage vast bureaucracies, make agonizing trade-offs under conditions of extreme uncertainty, and select competent people to execute strategy. None of those qualities are visible during a shouty exchange about a resignation.
The Danger of Media-Driven Politics
By treating PMQs as the centerpiece of British politics, the media distort public understanding of how change actually happens. It reinforces a simplistic, top-down view of governance where everything hinges on the personal authority of the individual at the top.
When a minister or an advisor resigns, the media demand a theatrical execution at the dispatch box. They want a narrative of crisis. But in the real world, a resignation is often just a symptom of structural friction within a coalition or a bureaucracy. It might mean a policy direction is being contested, or it might just mean a personality clash.
Focusing on the theater prevents us from looking at the structural issues. If the civil service is struggling to deliver major infrastructure projects, or if local government financing is on the brink of collapse, a witty retort at PMQs does absolutely nothing to solve the problem.
Worse, it encourages politicians to optimize for the short term. When success is measured by the Wednesday afternoon headlines, policy decisions are viewed through the lens of how they will play at the next session, rather than how they will impact the country in a decade.
Dismantling the Premise
People often ask: "Who won PMQs today?"
The only honest answer is: nobody. The public loses because their attention is directed away from real systemic issues. The politicians lose because they spend their time playing a game that hollows out their capacity to govern. The journalists lose because they become theater critics rather than reporters.
If we want better governance, we have to stop paying attention to the circus. We need to judge administrations not by how well their leaders defend their record during a 30-minute shouting match, but by the measurable, boring, unglamorous outcomes of their policies over years.
Stop watching the clips. Stop reading the live blogs. Turn off the television on Wednesday at noon, and look at the actual data instead.
