Last week, with barely a pause for ingratiation, they were at it again, making fools of themselves and the parliament they are meant to serve with the sort of brown-nose nonsense that we really had hoped had been banished for good after the Tory defeat in the last election. First, we had Roger Casale MP, who almost did enough to make you wish that Labour hadn't won Wimbledon from the Conservatives after all. His question to Tony Blair is such a good example of the kind of spurious tripe that some of our representatives spend their time dreaming up these days that it is worth -- if you can bear it -- repeating in full.

"Knowing my right honourable friend's interest in tennis," he began, "I am sure that we shall soon be seeing him in the Labour-held constituency of Wimbledon for the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet club championship there. While he is there, will he take the time to visit Wimbledon Park first school in my constituency where, thanks to the government's new deal for schools, all the children are already wired up to computers -- and even helping their local Member of Parliament track down the Wombles on the internet?"

Even without introducing the notion of a whole school full of children being "wired up to computers" -- which gave the Commons one of its best laughs since John Major lost his place at the dispatch box -- the question was so utterly daft, so totally without purpose, as to invite nothing but ridicule by way of a response. The Prime Minister didn't bother to say whether he would be going to Wimbledon, still less whether he'd pop into Wimbledon Park first school while he was there, of course, because that wasn't the object of the exercise. Indeed, he could hardly be bothered even to thrown in the obligatory few sentences about how the government was putting £1.3 billion into school repairs, which would wire up even more children to computers, which was a good thing because computers were new and modern and everyone knew how this government loved new and modern things.

We'd barely plumbed the depths of this banality when Lawrie Quinn, the new Labour MP for Scarborough and Whitby, raised us up to giddy heights of incredulity when he asked the Prime Minister to agree that we should give "all credit" to the "patient diplomacy of my right honourable friend the Minister of Agriculture" for all his achievements on behalf of the farming community. Not even Tony Blair could quite manage the invited hyperbole in reply to this one. Cabinet reshuffle-watchers should be aware that although the Prime Minister paid the expected tribute to his honourable friend the Agriculture Minister, he also said -- with one of those smiles fit to charm the inscription off a gravestone -- that: "There is still a long way to go and I counsel caution."

One of Tony Blair's first acts on becoming Prime Minister was to reduce the twice-weekly Prime Minister's Question Time to just one session per week. This was supposed to go along with a qualitative improvement in the content of that session -- putting an end not only to the "Yah-boo!" performances of the previous administration but also those "fawning, obsequious, softball, well-rehearsed and planted questions" so despised of Andrew Mackinlay. Instead, we have had not merely more of the same, but a conscious, coordinated campaign by the government news managers to turn Question Time into no more than a prime ministerial propaganda opportunity.

The most remarkable thing about this, moreover, is the number of New Labour types who are prepared to defend this sort of approach to politics publicly. Margaret "My mission in life is to make sure London gets a mayor who isn't Ken Livingstone" Hodge was quite merrily telling television viewers last Wednesday that there was nothing wrong in half a dozen Labour MPs taking up half of Prime Minister's Question Time every week to "celebrate the achievements" of this government -- as if that was the whole purpose of the occasion. And the New Statesman's Steve Richards, who's become a sort of defender-in-chief to Alistair Campbell in the journalistic profession, while being compelled to admit that "it is awful to watch", went on to argue that: "For now a more open session would be even more awful." Why? Because until such a time as we get proportional representation for Westminster elections, "There is no alternative to rigid control."

Now unlike a number of other contributors to this paper, I happen to be a strong and longstanding supporter of proportional representation (more of which, the editor permitting, another time). But even I would never make the argument that its absence makes it impossible for MPs to ask sensible -- or even difficult -- questions of their Prime Minister. It seems to me that the Hodges, Casales and Quinns of this world are misunderstanding both their role in parliament and the purpose of Prime Minister's Question Time.

So too, incidentally, is Steve Richards misunderstanding the role of a political journalist. It is not his job, as he did last week, to "welcome the rare combination of a sympathetic press and a disciplined party". Journalists and backbench MPs alike should be in the business of "speaking truth to power", not, like the Honourable Member for Wimbledon, making soft serves in the Prime Minister's court in the hope that they might be rewarded with a backhander.