Brown At Bay

One of the more worthwhile innovations of the Blair years was the creation of the parliamentary Liaison Committee, that group of MPs who chair select committees meeting together to question the Prime Minister. Whether it yields anything more than the weekly PMQs in front of all MPs is a moot point, although it is meant to allow for greater depth of question and answer. Brown, of course, has the habit of retreating into mind-numbing detail, as the Spectator's Fraser Nelson reports, but the keen observer can still glean something about the PM from these encounters, as the Times' Ann Treneman shows.