David Cameron comes up against some stiff opposition... at last

At last week’s Liaison Committee session, the PM did not react well to the first proper scrutiny he has faced for ages

Cameron can rehearse for PMQs, but in committee he must think on his feet (PA)

The first time I saw David Cameron lose his cool since the election was on Tuesday last week. He snapped: “If you don’t think there is a cell of people sitting in Raqqa who are planning to try to do damage to this country, then you don’t know what you are talking about.”

He was replying to Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative chairman of the Treasury select committee, who also chairs the Liaison Committee. The Prime Minister’s sessions before this committee, made up of the chairs of all select committees, have been renowned for dullness since they were started by Tony Blair 14 years ago to show what an open and accountable guy he was.

But this session was hand-to-hand combat from the start, when Tyrie tried to establish that the Prime Minister would “continue” to appear three times a parliamentary session. “That sounds right,” said Cameron. “One between Easter and summer recess, and one ...” Tyrie interrupted: “I think it will be two before the summer.”

Cameron replied: “I hadn’t banked on that. I think that might be more difficult.” Translation: “No.”

Tyrie: “Would you like to have a word with your bank?”

Cameron: “Let me take that away and think about it.” Translation: “I said no.”

Julian Lewis, Conservative chair of the defence select committee, asked for more information about the 70,000 “moderate” forces in Syria whom British air strikes are intended to assist. Cameron said: “I have given you my answer about what we are going to publish and I am not going to change that answer.”

That was another “No.” Tyrie pressed him, and he said: “I have considered it, but I have given the answer I think is appropriate.” Again, Google Translate gives that as: “I said no.”

Things then started to get properly testy, as Cameron accused Tyrie of calling him a liar (“saying that no one is going to believe me unless I give more detail”), and they clashed over Libya (an intervention that had gone “disastrously wrong”, said Tyrie).

They got into an argument over how much information the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) should be given in scrutinising the use of drone strikes in Syria. Tyrie wanted more; Cameron defended his right to keep things back. He was happy to have the ISC look at the intelligence, he said, but not to assess decisions about the strikes themselves – he would answer to the committee for those himself. It was when Tyrie objected that Cameron lost patience and told him he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Not only was this gripping theatre compared with the sleepy going-through-the-motions of Prime Minister’s Questions the next day, but you also sensed that Cameron was being tested. At PMQs, all he had to do was remember some statistics about housing. Here, he was forced to think: we witnessed an actual debate.

The argument is finely balanced. Tyrie pointed to a loophole in the principle that military action should be accountable to Parliament. Cameron gave his reasons for limited disclosure: “You have to be incredibly careful with highly sensitive information – information that, if revealed, could result in somebody’s death; the source that gave you that information could be at risk.” But it needed Tyrie’s tenacious questioning, which plainly irritated the Prime Minister, to make him spell out his argument.

Tuesday’s exchanges go some way to answering a question that has been troubling MPs ever since Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader: who will provide an opposition to this government?

Although Corbyn claims it was his pressure that caused the Government to postpone tax credit cuts and to cancel the Saudi prisons contract, those were changes made by Tories under pressure from Tory MPs.

A common theme among MPs – especially among Tories, interestingly enough – is that it is “unhealthy” to lack a credible alternative government. “When you have a strong opposition, you get better legislation out of this place,” one of them said last week. I’m not sure how true that is. Was the poll tax the product of Labour’s weakness in 1987? But it must be likely that decision-makers make better decisions if they feel they will pay for mistakes. One of the PM’s advisers told me last week that Labour seems entirely focused on Trident and “anti-austerity”, leaving the Government to make all the running on social policy – adoption, early years, mental health, prisons.

You don’t have to approve of Tory policy on any of these subjects to know that he had a point. “We mustn’t be complacent, ever, as a government,” he said, but I could not exactly hear the fear in his voice.

I have always been sceptical of the argument that, if the opposition is feeble, it is the duty of the media to oppose the government. Journalists should hold ministers to account, obviously, but it is not their job to provide political opposition.

A more convincing case can be made that, if the opposition is weak, governing parties will naturally provide their own counterweight. For much of the New Labour period, the Leader of the Opposition was, in effect, Gordon Brown – although opinions differ on how constructive his manoeuvring was, especially later on. For the last government, the Liberal Democrats provided an internal check and balance. But now, if visitors from another planet asked me to take them to my Leader of the Opposition, I would bring them to Andrew Tyrie.

Twitter.com/@JohnRentoul