Simple questions are the hardest

Prime minister's questions sketch
By Nick Assinder
Political correspondent, BBC News website

As David Cameron knows full well, the simple questions are often the hardest to answer.

Mr Blair doesn't always answer the question

Mind you, as the Tory leader regularly points out himself, the prime minister is entirely even handed about the questions he won't answer.

Easy, hard, simple or complex, all of them get the prime minister's silent treatment from time to time.

And, needless to say, when the question, no matter how simple, has something to do with the prime-minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown they become even less likely to receive a "yes or no" answer.

So when Mr Cameron asked Mr Blair whether the chancellor agreed with Home Secretary John Reid's plan to split the Home Office in two, it kicked several shins all at the same time.

It pointed out the possibility there is another rift between Mr Blair and Mr Brown, that there may be a similar clash, to put it politely, between Mr Brown and Mr Reid and that there might even be a gulf between Mr Blair and Mr Reid.

And, of course, there was the not-so-subliminal message that there is no longer any point to Tony Blair because the big decisions will now be taken by Mr Brown anyway. So Mr Blair should go now in order that government business can resume.

See, it's not so simple after all.

Universal delight

Mr Cameron used all six of his questions to attack the government over the "failing" Home Office and to demand a guarantee that the current prisons crisis will not see yet more early release programmes.

While he was at it, he also tried to fathom just what status Mr Reid's proposal to split the department currently has in the cabinet.

Sir Menzies confounded his critics

He failed to get his guarantee on the first and, on the second, seemed to spotlight the possibility that this proposal has not been greeted with universal delight by ministers.

And he had a couple of shipwreck-related sound bites to get him on the telly.

The chancellor was more interested in breaking up the home secretary than his department, and the government was lying on the political rocks, broken up and with ministers scrambling over the wreckage, he said.

Passion

The prime minister reverted to his claim that it is laughable for the Tories, once the party of law and order, to try and lecture him when they had voted against every tough crime measure and penny of expenditure on prisons and the like that he had proposed.

Gordon Brown and John Reid, meanwhile, spent much of the exchange engaged in animated and apparently chummy chat in the style of TV newsreaders at the end of a bulletin when the cameras are still on them but they are unsure whether the microphones have been turned off - so they display no signs they might really detest each other.

Then it was over to Liob Dem leader Sir Menzies Campbell, who once again confounded his critics by displaying genuine fire and passion over Iraq.

Ming, as he is known, repeated his call for a timetable for British troop withdrawals by October and, when he got the expected prime ministerial put down that such a deadline would play into the hands of the enemies in Iraq, he sprung his trap.

If the prime minister felt so strongly about it why was he refusing to lead the Commons debate on Iraq later in the day. "That is the kind of leadership we are entitled to," he declared.

"I am debating it with you now," was Mr Blair's counter to that.