MPs opt for just a light grill

It was a historic Westminster occasion - well, okay, the first event of its kind. And the queue to hear Tony Blair grilled for two and a half hours by a select group of MPs stretched for, ooh, feet. "You'll be taken in shortly," a flunky informed the waiting throng. Wrong. We were, as it turned out, taken in at length.

It would be unkind and unfair to blame the Prime Minister for this. The fault lay almost entirely with his interrogators, not that they deserve the name. To call the questioning tough is like calling Tim Henman a Wimbledon champion. You live in hope but it never actually happens.

"I was going to say you might want to take your jacket off, it is rather warm in here," the amiable committee chairman, Alan Williams, told Mr Blair. Too late. The Prime Minister already had. And he stayed a jump ahead throughout the session that followed.

The MPs, who each chair one of the all-party Commons committees, sat in an imposing horseshoe in the Boothroyd Room (you know you've retired as Speaker when they call a room after you). Mr Blair perched, alone, at the end.

Not for the first time, he said that his government, in its second term, was stepping away from spin and claimed that they were now ready to "do things differently". More interestingly, he appealed for agreement across the political parties on three critical issues, transport, housing and pensions, saying that all were too long-term and too complex to be political footballs.

He refused, politely but firmly, to allow advisers like Alastair Campbell or Jonathan Powell to appear for questioning, saying it was for ministers to answer to Parliament. Suggestions that Mr Campbell and Mr Powell have more power than most ministers could ever hope to attain were blandly batted away. Yes, he said, he was strengthening the power of the centre because, like any Prime Minister, he wanted to get things done. But that was not at the expense of Cabinet government or - perish the thought - Parliament.

On Iraq, he stuck to the mantra that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous man who should be removed but declined to say how. On the euro he stuck, like glue, to Gordon Brown's economic tests. And that was about it.

We'll spare the blushes of the MP (Tory Sir Nicholas Winterton actually) who, with the entire political arena before him, chose to ask the Prime Minister why the EU was taking control of the sale of herbal medicines.

We'll sympathise with the two exceptions, Gwyneth Dunwoody and Chris Mullin, who attempted to probe harder but got absolutely nowhere.

Perhaps things will sharpen up when the MPs and the Prime Minister next meet in January. Or perhaps it would be more effective to haul in a bunch of voters off the street, leaven the mix with a few schoolchildren and allow them to have a go.