It is happening within days of the birth of a royal baby to the Duchess of Cambridge. So royal biographer Penny Junor will on hand to answer questions and make comment.
And it is happening too on the day the House of Commons goes into recess. So Tory MP and Minister of Culture Ed Vaizey will be on the panel to cope with that and the problems ahead.
But whatever happens the evening of Thursday July 18 will provide some heated debate and fun when Question Time returns to this year’s Marlborough College’s annual Summer School.
The political panel will also include Tom Newton Dunn, political editor of the Sun, to provide some revelations, Baroness Falkner, the Lib-Dem foreign affairs spokesperson in the Lords, and will be completed by Labour’s Lord Liddle, author of The Blair Revolution.
“This year’s Question Time should prove to be even better than last year’s when we were up against not only the Olympic Games in London but also MPs’ summer holidays,” debate chairman Michael Kallenbach told Marlborough News Online.
“Nevertheless, we did set a rather high standard last year. So I hope this will become a regular fixture on the Summer School’s calendar.”
Michael, a former Daily Telegraph parliamentary correspondent who retrained as a couples counsellor, knows the political world – and the local area – well. He lives in Mildenhall and works both in London and Marlborough.
He believes that because the Coalition is experiencing so many problems, this should provide added impetus to the temperature of debate at Question Time.
“No one is suggesting that the Coalition won’t last until the end of this Parliament, in 2015, but the relationship between David Cameron and Nick Clegg is under continued strain that this scenario will rumble on for months ahead,” he pointed out.
“There has also been so much about MPs’ private lives hitting the headlines recently, from Chris Huhne, former Lib Dem MP, to Nigel Evans, one of the deputy Speakers, and just for good measure add Sally Bercow and her obsession with Twitter to the mix, so there’s plenty on the go.”
This is the second year that Jon Copp, the Summer School’s director, has decided to stage a Question Time debate. He is expecting a bigger audience than last summer when Tory MP Claire Perry created headlines when she incorrectly announced that the Duchess of Cambridge, a former Marlborough College student, was pregnant.
Tickets costing £10 can be bought at the door on the night of the event. To get mor information about the Summer School events visit: www.mcsummerschool.org.uk
