The internet has changed the way politics is viewed, but the essence of the House of Commons cannot be conveyed through a screen

Some political speeches can hold the attention of MPs – and others fail

I cannot say how much of a privilege it is to have a front-row seat for history. I mean that literally. My usual seat in the press gallery of the House of Commons, number 78, in the corner behind the prime minister and to her left is where I now watch the rules of the British constitution being rewritten.

I have never seen anything like it, and I have seen some great parliamentary moments. My first day in the press gallery, as The Independent’s new political correspondent, was in 1995, when Tony Blair, the leader of the opposition, told John Major there was a difference between them: “I lead my party; he follows his.”

I shall never forget the roar from the packed Labour benches, a deep-throated delight in the smack of firm leadership and a jubilant recognition that they really were on their way back to government.

Some things are different if you are there in person. That noise was one of them. Today it still helps to know that indefinable thing, the mood of the house, and that other thing, who commands the house and who doesn’t. Last year, Boris Johnson spoke a couple of times from the back benches, giving a speech on which he had evidently worked. They were well-argued speeches and they read well. But when he delivered them in the chamber, they fell flat. He doesn’t have it.

Michael Gove, his nemesis, on the other hand, does. I wasn’t in the chamber for his wind-up speech in the confidence debate last week, but I was there – on the other side of the press gallery where you can face the minister speaking from the despatch box – a few days earlier when he led the debate on the government’s Brexit deal.

It was a joy to watch. The confidence with which he speaks in paragraphs, takes interventions from both sides of the house and responds to them with wit, courtesy and clarity is exceptional. He even combines all this with the cruder skills of grabbing headlines – on this occasion by being the first MP to use the word bollocks in the chamber.

But I missed the speech in which he urged MPs to vote that they had confidence in Her Majesty’s Government, an oration that reminded a surprised Conservative Party that it did, after all, have the right to govern – and which projected Gove overnight to bookies’ favourite as next Conservative leader.

These days there is a choice: watch in the chamber and tweet slowly on the dodgy wifi; or watch it on a computer – often in an office 30 metres away – where you can write at the same time and put screenshots from the video feed on Twitter instantly.

The internet has changed everything, but there is still no substitute for being “in the room where it happens”.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator