I was quite wrong about the Liaison Committee – it was gripping to watch Boris Johnson scrutinised

As a reluctant wielder of a pitchfork, I was unwilling to join in the high democratic indignation about the prime minister’s refusal to be interviewed by the Liaison Committee of the House of Commons. The committee has existed since 1967, but it wasn’t important until Tony Blair decided in 2002 that inviting himself to its meetings would be a good way of trying to get his message across without the yah-boo of Prime Minister’s Questions.

The trouble was that without the noise and the theatre, and with such a practised communicator as Blair, these sessions were mostly dull. By the time we got to Theresa May, she managed to turn them into endless deserts of catatonic tedium. She and Yvette Cooper looked over their glasses at each other disapprovingly, but that was about as interesting as it got.

So I thought Boris Johnson’s inability to find a free date in his diary for the committee was not the worst outrage against democracy for someone who had tried to suspend parliament. Nor could I get too exercised about Johnson imposing his choice of chair, Sir Bernard Jenkin, on the committee, which is made up of the chairs of all the select committees.

And I was surprised when the prime minister finally agreed to attend the committee on Wednesday, 10 months after taking office. There is a running dispute about whether prime ministers are expected to give evidence to the committee twice or three times a year, but zero times a year turns out to have looked too defensive even for Johnson.

Even so, I thought, it will be utterly tedious and the champions of democratic accountability who had been getting worked up about it were going to look foolish. How wrong I was. It was gripping to watch, from the moment Pete Wishart, the Scottish Nationalist, praised the prime minister’s bravery in being “prepared to sacrifice the credibility and popularity of your own government just to stand by your man”.

Johnson fumbled his way through the 90-minute session, which cruelly exposed the unsuitability of his speaking style, all ums, errs and unfinished sentences, to such a serious situation as this.

Usually, the problem with the liaison committee is that the members are too self-important to ask short and precise questions. But most of them did well on Wednesday and, although many of the prime minister’s answers were thoughtful and important, they were delivered in such a hesitant way as to erode the viewers’ confidence.

It turned out to be a revealing session in which MPs performed a valuable democratic service in holding the prime minister to account.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator