Time to get real, select committees achieve nothing...
There was one moment during the Culture, Media and Sport select committee 'grilling' of Rupert and James Murdoch which offered a moment of blinding clarity.
Tom Watson, arguably the only MP on the committee to actually ask any probing questions, asked Murdoch junior if he was aware that the committee had previously found News International 'guilty of corporate amnesia' over phone hacking.
Watson was referring to a conclusion drawn in the committee's previous report on allegations of phone hacking, back in the days when it was believed only celebrities and royals were the target.
Murdoch Jnr replied that, no, he hadn't been aware of that conclusion.
That short, relatively sharp exchange, told us everything we need to know about the sideshow existence of select committees. They have no teeth, can force no change and certainly can't find people guilty of anything.
In the build up to the Murdochs' appearance before the committee, there was much talk of them being held to account and made to come clean about what had been going on inside News International.
The truth was, and is, that the select committee was more about MPs being seen to do something quickly in response to what they see as public outrage.
And while there's no doubt many people do find the actions of the News of the World appalling, there's always a danger that those inside the Westminster bubble get a distorted view once something involves their own little world.
Police investigations, judge-led inquiries, a government's change in attitude - those things can force a change. Select committees cannot. Just ask Liverpool Riverside MP Louise Ellman, whose work as chair of the transport select committee is both thorough and determined. Had previous governments listened to her reports, the rail network would be in a much better place today.
The select committee wasn't helped by the appalling questions asked. There was no coherent interrogation from anyone other than Watson. One member, Louise Mensch has been much more dogged in her pursuit of Piers Morgan after she made a false allegation about him under parliamentary privilege than she was with those in front of her at the select committee. Why so much effort on Twitter and so little on committee day? Perhaps that comes with experience.
Select committees fail because they select who they want to hear from. So they got the Murdochs take on events, which were then challenged by other ex-executives later in the week. That's surely not the way to reach a conclusion on an issue.
The MPs may have seen themselves as being part of history. In the case of Mensch and a couple of others, it may ensure a bit of an escape of the obscurity of the back benches. But actually making a real difference? Not likely.
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David Higgerson - David Higgerson has covered local and national politics for much of his career as a journalist. This blog aims to look at Westminister from the outside in, at a time when it appears very few are looking out from the inside.
You might be interested in this, it's a report by UCL's Constitution Unit into the policy influence of Select Committees over the last decade and found evidence of significant, but not overwhelming, influence. The most informative statistics for your purposes are on pages 51 and 52 - 48% of Committee recommendations are accepted and just slightly under that (44%) are implemented.
I quite agree that MPs interrogative skills leave something to be desired though...
You might be interested in this. It's a report by UCL's Constitution Unit into the policy influence of Select Committees over the last decade and it found evidence of significant, but not overwhelming, influence. The most informative statistics for your purposes are on pages 51 and 52 - 48% of Committee recommendations are accepted and just slightly under that (44%) are implemented.
I quite agree that MPs interrogative skills leave something to be desired though...