Prime Minister's Questions: Westminster's weekly gladiatorial combat

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Prime Minister's Questions: Westminster's weekly gladiatorial combat - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 104

29 Aug 2025

Every Wednesday at noon, the House of Commons chamber comes alive with Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), the loudest, most theatrical half-hour in British politics. To some it’s democratic accountability; to others, a raucous playground of yah-boo antics. Loved and loathed in equal measure, PMQs is Parliament’s weekly shop window, offering a revealing glimpse of how Britain does politics. In this episode, we explore its history, purpose, and international impact, including why France briefly trialled it last year only to drop the idea.

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Each week, Prime Minister’s Questions turns Westminster into a spectacle of jeers, cheers, and gladiatorial verbal combat. Is it serious accountability, or just political theatre?

Joining us this week is Dr Ruxandra Serban, Lecturer in Comparative Politics at UCL, whose research compares PMQs with questioning sessions around the world. Together, we explore:

why it matters that the Prime Minister faces MPs each week;
how PMQs evolved from dry “engagements questions” into today’s noisy clash;
what the public really thinks of when they watch MPs jeering, cheering and point-scoring; and
whether PMQs could ever change, or if the ritual is too entrenched.

Dr Serban also explains how other countries view Westminster’s weekly spectacle – sometimes as a model of democratic accountability, sometimes as a cautionary tale.

She compares PMQs with similar sessions in Canada, Australia, and Ireland, and reflects on why France’s National Assembly briefly adopted its own PMQs-style experiment in 2024, before quietly abandoning it months later.

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Our guest

Dr Ruxandra Serban

Ruxandra Serban is Lecturer in Comparative Politics in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy at University College London, researching how things work in different parliaments. She earned her doctorate in Political Science from UCL, on “Questioning Prime Ministers: Procedures and Practices in Parliamentary Democracies”. Previously she obtained a Master’s degree at UCL in Democracy and Comparative Politics, having graduated from the University of Bucharest with a BA in Political Science. She is a Co-convener of the Political Studies Association’s Specialist Group on Parliaments.

Resources

Hansard Society

Parliament Matters podcast – Gaffes and grace at PMQs (Episode 19)

UCL Constitution Unit

Transcript

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D’Arcy: And I'm Mark D’Arcy. And welcome to another of our special summer recess editions where we're taking a look at Parliament's biggest weekly event, the Wednesday bun fight that is Prime Minister's Question Time.

Ruth Fox: Yes, the half hour when 15 randomly selected MPs get the chance to ask our head of government about any issue they choose and the Leader of the Opposition gets to put six questions to the Prime Minister.

Mark D’Arcy: One of the leading academic PMQ watchers is Ruxandra Serban, Lecturer of Comparative Politics at UCL, who's compared the way [00:01:00] Westminster interrogates its PM to the practice in other parliaments.

Ruth Fox: So we began by asking her what she thought the public made of Westminster's weekly gladiatorial combat.

Ruxandra Serban: Well, it seems that by many measures it's not an ideal view of Parliament. You see politicians arguing with each other, clashing over things, having this sort of very confrontational dialogue in many ways, and there's...

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