I went to Lady Thatcher’s last ever Prime Minister’s Questions in 1990. I remember the experience well, and of course I didn’t actually know it was her last ever PMQs at the time. The thing that struck me was the House of Commons debating chamber is like a TV studio, or film set, or at least seems that way from the public gallery. In a sense it is, as it is a set-piece spectacle for the media, almost as firm a ritual as Coronation St. or EastEnders. That it is supposed to hold the Government to account is not really what most of us are interested in. It’s a barometer of the important issue of the day, whether Ed Miliband can deliver an effective punch, and whether David Cameron will be ‘on the ropes’ or respond with a counter-hook of his own.

From the perspective of the media managers such as Craig Oliver and Nick Robinson, a concern will be how the exchange will be reported on the 6 o’clock news or the 10 o’clock news. There will have been some of us who witness the ex change live, and we will happily provide instantaneous feedback with our hashtag #PMQs. Media commentators will usually give a decisive result, such as “Miliband triumphant” or, rarely these days, “Cameron floored that”. For all his quips about how Ed Miliband “practises” in front of a mirror – and David, the one olds aren’t really your best – Cameron is neurotic that his Party comes across well in the whole performance. Conservatives are, it is reported, even sent memoranda reminding them of the need for barracking and heckling the opposition.

The advantage of Prime Minister’s Questions is of course that questions can be asked of the Prime Minister under parliamentary privilege. Lord Neuberger, former Master of the Rolls and President-Elect of the Supreme Court, and Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice, are rightly keen that parliamentary privilege is not abused in the House of Commons. However, it is perhaps worth noting that the content of the answers often are poor in comparison to the question being asked. For example, Debbie Abrahams in her question asks simply, “Can the Prime Minister explain the relationship between Virgin Care donations to the Tory party, the number of Virgin Care shareholders on clinical commissioning group boards and the number of NHS contracts that have been awarded to Virgin Care?” In science, there is often no relationship. That is indeed the null hypothesis for all experiments ever conducted in scientific research, so, strictly speaking, all that David Cameron had to do was provide that there wasn’t significant evidence that there wasn’t no link to support his thesis (if you pardon the double negative). Ian Lavery MP’s question provides another interesting example.

You will notice the sombre mood of the House, as is indeed fitting as this precise theoretically could have happened to any sitting MP of the House of Commons. This is where it is more fitting to think of ‘grading’ PMQs not as a “knockout boxing match”, but a Finals exam script. The default option is a II.1, unless a really good answer merits a First, and a really appalling answer merits a Third. Cameron’s answers are normally in the safe II.1/II.2 category, although he sometimes fails to answer the question altogether. Here the answer is a II.2 really in all honesty, because, while he uses the opportunity to praise a policy which is on the ropes, i.e. the large number of benefit claimants having their original (adverse) decisions overturned on appeal, he in no way addresses the main point. The issue is, of course, put in a strong way that, “austerity kills”, as serious academics address the point in peer-reviewed medical journals whether the austerity agenda of countries including the UK has had an adverse effect on citizens. Take for example this excellent paper from Prof Martin McKee’s laboratory here in London on the “failed experiment” of austerity, in the peer-reviewed ‘Clinical Medicine’, the official journal of the Royal College of Physicians.

Unfortunately, we have all become accustomed to the non-answers given by the Prime Minister during PMQs, but this, in all fairness, is not drastically different from other Prime Ministers in the past, arguably. If the answers do not provide much detail about fine detail, they can possibly throw some light onto the operational smoothness of the running of the Government, and the degree to which they have insight into how seriously the public take their policies seriously. The “Big Society” has had more relaunches than most PR people would like to contemplate, and here is David Cameron trying to shoehorn the relevance and importance of the Big Society into the Tory Britain of David Cameron.

Whilst in no doubt well intentioned, the problem with this answer encapsulates the whole thrust of the main criticism of the Big Society. People have discussed how the Big Society is merely “a cover for cuts”, and it exposes in all its glory how David Cameron has simply has no answer for the failure of market economics. Ed Miliband wishes to advance the notion of a ‘responsible State’ working for the greater ‘public good’, so is able to provide a rebuttal of Cameron’s answer mocking how voluntereeism is not a solution for child malnutrition. This of course plays right into the hands of Labour MPs, and many Labour activists, who feel that Cameron’s Tory Britain has seen a return to Victorian values, in extreme painted as a picture of workhouses and poverty. The implementation of workfare has lent some support to the idea of people being taken advantage of, and the subtext here is that there are some people who have drawn substantial benefit from this culture of ‘using’ labour. The problem with David Cameron’s “something for nothing” jibe is that it can be easily answered with the chaos over workfare, and reports of issues such as George Osborne’s paddock. That large corporates have more of a say in David Cameron’s Britain is a picture which is easy to paint without any effort, such as McKinsey’s being chief “players” in the NHS restructuring (ahead of the BMA, RCN or medical Royal Colleges, for example), or Serco “winning big” for the National Citizen Service contracts. The idea of ‘flexible labour’, i.e. a workforce where job security is nil, could go a long way to explain the record levels of people seemingly in employment (and a equally comparable record number of people with little job security). The problem is that, when Cameron makes another gaffe, legions of Labour activists respond by saying on Twitter, “that’s what he really meant”.

That was the natural conclusion, for example, of this gaffe:

We do not get much of a chance to enter the mindset of David Cameron and his Tory-led Cabinet, and we equally do not have an accurate picture of what is reported from the Tory-led BBC and others, many believe. However, hearing certain things ‘from the horses mouth’ is indeed revealing. If David Cameron had answered his final scripts in the Final Honour School of Philosophy, Psychology and Economics for Brasenose College Oxford, he would have erred into II.2 territory, not because of his lack of preparation and well-researched material, but his simple failure to answer the question. The answers, however, do offer clues for me as to how he thinks about what sort of Society he wants, and what sort of people he values in Society.