The weekly ritual that sits at the heart of Westminster’s public image beckons, the half an hour or so of verbal jousting at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs).
Prime ministerial memoirs tell the stories of how central a moment it is in the week of any occupant of 10 Downing Street.
Sir Tony Blair wrote that “PMQs was the most nerve wracking, discombobulating, nail biting, bowel moving, terror inspiring, courage draining experience in my prime ministerial life, without question”.
Now, for the first time, it is Andy Burnham’s turn to feel those nerves. And yet, curiously, the questions at lunchtime may well feel like a minor extension to the three and a half hours of questions he faced on Tuesday afternoon.
And this is because Parliament is playing catch-up: six weeks into the job, Burnham is encountering the moments that would typically arrive in the opening days, the routine moments of scrutiny in the House of Commons.
His arrival in office coincided with the departure of MPs from Westminster for the summer, and so the prime minister had a month or so that felt rather like a soft launch, heatwaves plentiful, Commons questions absent. Now plenty of them are coming, all at once.
I observed Andy Burnham’s opening moments in the Commons as prime minister from the Press Gallery. He hovered by the Speaker’s chair waiting his turn, flanked by Labour’s Deputy Leader, Lucy Powell, who appeared to brush some fluff from the back of his jacket, and Louise Haigh, his first secretary of state.
