Prime Minister’s Questions is usually incredibly tedious – a pantomime of performative emptiness that sucks the will to live from anyone foolish enough to watch it. But now, overnight, it has become a fresh kind of appointment TV. It is a parable, taking place in real time, of whether one man can change the machine or whether the machine will change him.

Plenty of prime ministers have disliked PMQs, and some have tried to change it. Andy Burnham is the first whose trenchant critique of how it operates is one of the defining aspects of his premiership.

He wants to get rid of the shouty vacuousness, the party-political tubthumping and the glib pointless insults. He wants, in his words, to replace point-scoring with problem solving.

But it is hard for one man to take on the machine. The incentives of the Westminster system push politicians towards the worst version of themselves. They demand total victory over your opponent and provide no rewards for cooperation or consensus.

The emotional tenor of the Commons chamber is overwhelming. You can never quite understand what it’s like if you’re watching on television. The mics only pick up the voice of the person speaking and tune out the great barrage of angry insults coming from other parts of the chamber. The prime minister stands right down there at the bottom, facing a wall of human noise, a vast slab of opposition MPs jeering and laughing at them.

Whenever they stumble, they will see these braying hyenas mock them. Whenever they land a blow, they will hear a great thump of Spartan approval behind them, the........

© iNews