Just after noon, on every Wednesday that Parliament is sitting, David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, rises to his feet in the House of Commons and savages Gordon Brown. Labour mps, packed into the government benches for the weekly ritual of prime minister's questions (pmos), look on with grim, set faces as Mr Cameron mocks and denounces his antagonist. Sometimes, like an enraged tethered bear, Mr Brown fights back, howling that Mr Cameron is merely a "shallow salesman", an insubstantial con man.rnIt has become a platitude of political commentary in Britain to envy the drama that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton brought to American politics. But neither America nor most other democracies offers a spectacle to match the gladiatorial rawness of pmos, which has itself rarely been so compelling as it is now. An irascible workaholic Scot, one of the architects of New Labour, faces a patrician Tory with unmistakably pukka vowels-a suave upstart who seems set to wrench away the premiership that Mr Brown waited ten covetous years to inherit from Tony Blair.
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