To start with, the exchange between Cameron and Miliband was just a bit silly. It started out quite well, indeed it seemed as if Ed was willing to be a bit more conciliatory, as if he wanted to really work with the Government to sort out the problems at hand. And then he went down the Andy Coulson route, perhaps not as strongly as he might have done, but he went there nonetheless. So inevitably Cameron went down the Tom Baldwin road, and they both just ended up shouting "he just doesn't get it." Well, congratulations guys, for once you're both right; neither of you fucking get it.
And then came the follow-up questions from the rest of the house. Cameron obviously has his back benches extremely well drilled, because it appeared from watching PMQs that the Conservative party has absolutely no concern about phone hacking or Andy Coulson or indeed anything about this whole crisis. The first ten questions went thus: Labour asked about phone hacking. A Tory asked, to mutterings of disbelief from around the house, about car insurance. Labour asked about phone hacking. The Tories asked about...the Eurozone. Labour asked about phone hacking. The Tories asked about...cable theft. That's right, fucking cable theft. The major, pressing issue of the day is obviously cable theft. You can't hack someone's phone if the phone line has been nicked, right? Labour asked about phone hacking. The Tories asked about carbon emissions. Labour asked about phone hacking. The Tories got about as lose as they ever did to phone hacking by asking about Gary thingy, the computer hacker who got extradited to the States. When a Tory member did eventually give a scant mention to the crisis which has engulfed the entire nation's media and political outlook, he did it as an attack on Labour.
Could the deliberate dodging of the issue be any more obvious? Or was John Bercow somehow doing this on purpose, letting Cameron have a succession of soft-balls from his own court? I highly doubt it, being as Bercow himself is hated throughout the Conservative party and especially by Cameron, and he actually asked at least one Conservative member to leave the house during a particularly intense period of heckling.
But I've gone on long enough for one day. As I say, both Cameron and Miliband hit the nail on the head...they just don't get it.
