The return of the Liaison Committee has added to the prime minister’s coronavirus problems

The very fact that the prime minister appeared before the Liaison Committee at all – only a week after it was finally set up – suggests the government may want to contradict the narrative that Boris Johnson is averse to scrutiny. However, his debut appearance, which was notable for the gaps in his knowledge and lack of preparation, suggests that the prime minister will be reluctant to return any time soon.

Having installed its own chair, the government need to show the Liaison Committee can still work

The prime minister’s early appearance was a gesture of support to Sir Bernard Jenkin, who the government installed as chair of the committee last week. This departed from the established practice of the last decade which had seen Liaison chairs elected by the committee itself.

Critics were watching carefully to see whether the loyal Conservative backbencher would give Johnson an easy ride. In practice, while other chairs undertook the detailed scrutiny, Jenkin’s main contribution was to manage the tricky choreography of a remote evidence session.

He did this well, but failed, twice, to extract any commitment from Johnson to appear before the committee again. The prime minister argued that the government was probably too busy dealing with coronavirus for him to be subject to more scrutiny before the summer recess – and made clear that officials were certainly too busy to devote time to an inquiry into the actions of his chief adviser Dominic Cummings.  

The committee made little progress on Cummings, but quite a lot on coronavirus

As with the government’s now standard response in press conferences and media interviews, the prime minister was determined not to get into any detailed discussion about the actions of ‘his adviser’. Every question was closed down with an assertion of the need to move on. Several chairs tried to extract an apology. Johnson gave several, but for the frustration and upset that Covid-19 had caused for the British people, not for the Cummings furore directly.

Once the chairs moved onto wider areas of questioning, however, the select committee format began to demonstrate its value as an accountability mechanism. By focusing on their respective policy areas, many chairs drilled down with specific questions which established new information on the record.

For example, Health and Social Care Committee chair Jeremy Hunt – who was the secretary of state in charge of health for nearly six years – extracted a candid admission from Johnson that the UK had not learnt the lessons of SARS or MERS. This, the prime minister argued, meant that at the start of the pandemic Public Health England did not have capacity, test kits or staff to mount the sort of track and test operation that had been seen in several east Asian countries. Hunt’s question about why this capacity had not been scaled up more rapidly was left unanswered.

Greg Clark, chair of the Science and Technology Committee, pressed Johnson on the finer details of the new test and trace policy and on the disparity between the UK’s social distancing guideline of 2m and the advice in many other countries to remain just 1m or 1.5m apart. Admitting that he normally read a précis of SAGE discussions rather than scientific papers themselves, Johnson could only admit that this disparity reflected the different advice of UK scientists. He did say that he had now asked for it to be looked at again.

Despite his preparation, the prime minister was caught out by lack of knowledge of key policy

The prime minster admitted the session had required a great deal of preparation, but evidence of detailed policy understanding was notably scarce in some of his answers. Most striking was Johnson’s apparent ignorance – revealed by his response to Stephen Timms, chair of the Work and Pensions Committee – of his government’s policy of denying some migrants recourse to public funds, a policy which MPs report has left tens of thousands in desperate circumstances during the pandemic.

The most effective questioning – short, focused and relentless – came from Caroline Nokes, chair of the Women and Equalities Committee. Despite knowing she would be amongst the chairs questioning him, the prime minister seemed underprepared for her questions about the impact of coronavirus on women. At one point he was rebuked by Jenkin for giving too flippant an answer. And he seemed to have given little thought to the contribution of women to the government’s decision-making on coronavirus – as opposed to their (also limited) appearances at press briefings or role in delivery.

When Johnson was again pressed to reappear before the committee, the prime minister said the problem was the amount of time (his own and that of his Sherpas) that was needed to help him prepare. It was a revealing moment. 

The session showed the committee works, but the question is when it will return

The Liaison Committee is an unwieldy vehicle for questioning – hence the need to limit the number of chairs involved. This caused controversy ahead of this evidence session, with government critics Tom Tugendhat and Tobias Ellwood complaining at having been excluded. But when compared to other vehicles for Parliament to hold the prime minister to account, the Liaison Committee has definite strengths. It is less overtly partisan and theatrical than prime minister’s questions, and lines of inquiry can be sustained for longer than when MPs question the PM after a statement. It also takes place in public, unlike the 1922 committee or other private meetings between the prime minister and backbenchers.

Boris Johnson’s first evidence session in front of the Liaison Committee exposed gaps in government thinking, put new matters on the record and showed the public that the prime minister was being held to account. It is no wonder Johnson is not keen to commit to repeat the experience any time soon. But in the interests of good government, he should.