Within the UK parliament there are several sites of contestable leadership. To the extent that parliament has a public leadership role it is in the questioning and scrutiny of government, holding elite actors to account. The sharpest interaction in the UK is that between the prime minister and parliament. This paper examines the prime minister’s appearances before the Liaison Committee as a distinct forum for questioning. This forum acts as an alternative to Prime Minister’s Questions, but also is the scene of interaction between the most senior elected parliamentarians (select committee chairs) and the leader of the government. MPs have resources to exchange and a leadership role to perform. In addition to exploring the applicability of various leadership frameworks of analysis to legislative leadership, this paper takes forward work by Kelso (2016) on leadership in parliament and by Bennister, Kelso and Larkin (2016) on the Liaison Committee to understand and explain this interaction. The paper draws on ethnographic work by the author as an academic fellow in parliament to consider what constitutes effective questioning in this context and what can we learn about prime ministerial leadership from the exchanges?
