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Originally Posted by Damien
Actually Blair has widely been thought of as good at PMQ. In the early days of Howards leadership he couldnt land an attack on Blair. Blair does hold himself up quite well. The reason why he hasnt done it before is because no one else has, why should he be any different? If your expected to win an election then you dont have a debate, this is because you cannot win many votes but you can lose them.
Seems unfair to attack Blair on this when no previous leaders have had a TV debate. Also as for getting attacks on TV when giving interviews, he allows them too, some prime ministers may not go for so much debate on TV but he does. He went on BBC, Sky, ITV, Channel 5 even MTV for live debates. Of course he doesnt like to be told people dont like him, who would? but he still goes onto TV for live debates. Howard got attacked badly on ITV, really was a train wreck but good for him to allow himself to be open to it as well  |
Tony Bliar is appauling at PMQ, which is why he changed it from an hour to two 30 min sessions, he could not cope with Hague.
Every poplitical analyst I've heard on the matter agrees with that.
He then regularly got mauled by IDS and Howard often gets TB flustered, so much so that TB has had to resort to totally ignoring questions, answering the question asked before so that the final question never recieved an answer, and then of course there was the incident when he was so flumoxed he forgot who was PM and started asking Howard questions
As for Howard on ITV, he made some good points, although needs to change his hand gestures.
And it was ironic that he was accused of not knowing what it was like to be a first generation immigrant experiencing racism when his parents came here fleeing the Nazi's and he's had to change his surname in order to get where he is today.
A very good point about the immigration issue was made on the radio while I was coming into work, that the reason why the other parties are accusing the Tories of playing the race card by bringing up immigration is simply because they don't have a clue what to do themselves and it's easier to do that than enter into a discussion.
Take the Lib Dems "we'll have an independant commision look into the issue" which is political talk for "we haven't a clue and don't want anyone to be able to call us racist so they can blame the commision"