It is worth remembering, however, that on Thursday Mr Blair’s backbenchers were prepared to play along with him to the extent of giving him the shorter of the two periods of delay for which he was asking. In particular, the charge that it had been carried out by email was the cause of special offence. Why, Dame Edith Evans playing Lady Bracknell could not have been more dismissive. Emails, indeed! What would the right honourable gentleman be thinking of next? It was, Mr Blair said, preposterous. It gave one some idea of the depths to which the Leader of the Opposition was prepared to sink.

Mr Blair pretended to be horrified, not so much by the fraud as by the allegation. They were perfectly good questions, but Mr Tony Blair managed to convey, as he usually does, that all the trouble had started under the previous Conservative government and that now, through Herculean exertions of mind and body, his own administration was slowly bringing matters under some kind of control.The previous week, Mr Howard had asked about some fraud allegedly perpetrated by email. The preliminary talk usually serves to illustrate what bad guessers most people are. Perhaps that, after all, is the point of it.
Still, if I had been asked, shortly before midday last Wednesday, what question Mr Michael Howard was likely to bring up, I should have replied unhesitatingly: fox-hunting And I would have been wrong. Instead Mr Howard asked about the failings of the Child Support Agency and about policemen who were required to complete a foot-long form after stopping anyone in the street.

It’s already 10pm – how much of it can I use?When you turn on the television tonight, you may see a woman wearing a lurid red and pink nylon ruched one-piece alongside Nancy in her leafy thong and Sophie in her perky bra. At least I’ll be hard to miss – wish me luck!
More from Janet Street-Porter. From time to time, not very often these days, I have appeared on television programmes constructed round Prime Minister’s Questions. The preliminary bit is always devoted to a discussion of what questions are likely to come up. This, I must confess, has always struck me as a somewhat pointless exercise, because we have to wait only a few minutes to know for certain what the questions will be.