“He Is Just the Nowhere Man of British Politics”: Personal Attacks in Prime Minister’s Questions

Abstract

Views from the media, the public, and from inside Parliament have expressed discontent with, reportedly, recent high levels of personally antagonistic behavior in Prime Minister's Questions. The focus of this study is a fine-grained analysis of language classified as a personal attack. A personal attack coding system was devised, and significant individual differences between Prime Ministers and increases across individual premierships were observed. Of the five Prime Ministers between 1979 and 2016, David Cameron was the most personally aggressive, though a significant decrease followed Jeremy Corbyn's appointment as Leader of the Opposition. Potential explanations for recent highs include heightened TV and social media attention coupled with sports-like reporting and party expectation, and not discounting individual personalities or intergroup theories. Suggestions for the functions of personal attacks include highlighting differences, disarming or deconstructing adversaries, and equivocation. Further explanations are offered for the relative politeness of Cameron versus Corbyn.

Questioning scrutiny: the effect of Prime Minister’s Questions on citizen efficacy and trust in parliament

“…PMQs also appears to have become more partisan and raucous recently, especially after the introduction of cameras in the House of Commons (Franklin & Norton, 1993). The number of interruptions (Bates et al, 2014) and personal attacks (Waddle et al, 2019) has increased. 1 Beyond scrutiny, PMQs may perform other important functions such as allowing MPs to fulminate (Norton, 1993;Shephard & Braby, 2020, p. 40), highlight constituency service (Parker & Richter, 2018), and engage in party team-building (Rush & Giddings, 2011).…”

Curbing Their Antagonism: Topics Associated with a Reduction in Personal Attacks at Prime Minister’s Questions

“…Research by Waddle et al (2019) covered the same five premierships, but focused specifically on personal attacks between party leaders. Findings revealed increases in attacks across each premiership, and the highest levels of personal antagonism by the more recent leaders, particularly PM David Cameron.…”

“…The purpose of this research is an evaluation of PMQs, with the focus on question topic and how that might be reflected in the nature of interpersonal behaviour between the main players in these debates (the party leaders). Analysis of behaviour is based on our recent study of personal attacks in PMQs across a 37-year period (Waddle et al, 2019). Therein a coding system was proposed to identify personal attacks in the questions and responses: referred to also as personalisation (described below).…”

“…The dataset for this research comprised the same questions and responses used in our previous study (Waddle et al, 2019). There, the intention was to devise a method to identify personal attacks in PMQs, then to look for differences in the use of such personalised language between party leaders and across premierships.…”

“…The coding method for personal attacks was based on language characterised as disrespectful. Full details of the coding procedure for personal attacks can be found in Waddle et al (2019). To summarise, identification of a personal attack was based on comments aimed specifically at the member opposite which contained or were couched in personal disrespect.…”