We counted every word of the new Prime Minister’s first PMQs

Parliament came back from summer recess on 1 September. The next day, Andy Burnham — Prime Minister since 20 July, and new to that particular Dispatch Box — took his first Prime Minister’s Questions.

Twenty-one MPs asked. One Speaker refereed. The whole thing ran to 6,558 words, 1,848 of them unique.

We put the full Hansard transcript into WordCloud+ to see what the session was about. The first attempt told us something, though not the thing we were looking for.

The Commons spends a lot of breath on manners

“Prime minister” turns up 44 times. “Hon” — as in my hon. Friend, the hon. Lady — turns up 42. “Friend” 18 times, “lady” 15, “gentleman” 8. Nobody in that chamber said “friend” because they were feeling friendly.

Add up the forms of address and you get 249 words, close to one word in every 25. It is the linguistic equivalent of a handshake, and on the page it is the loudest thing in the room.

This is a word cloud earning its keep by failing usefully. You can see at a glance that the dominant feature of PMQs is not a subject. It is the etiquette.

So we pushed the furniture into the stop word list — prime, minister, hon, right, friend, lady, gentleman, speaker, member, house — and ran it again.

What was actually said

Young people wins outright, on 12 mentions. It came up in questions about T-levels, work placements, bus fares, NEET figures and museum tickets, which is a wide enough spread that it reads as a genuine theme rather than one MP’s hobby horse.

Greater Manchester is second, on 8. Every single one came from the Prime Minister, citing his old job as evidence for his new one. If you wanted a one-word summary of his answering style, the cloud has quietly provided it.

Then Northern Ireland (8) and cost of living (5), and after that the long tail where PMQs really lives: capital city police funding for Cardiff. North Devon’s maternity unit. A mass transit system for Bristol. The Croydon rail bottleneck. In-patient mental health beds in Bedford. Twenty-one MPs, twenty-one constituencies, twenty-one asks.

The barbecue problem

“Ban on disposable barbecues” appears three times, and lands in the cloud at about the same size as “private member’s bill” and rather bigger than “defence investment plan”.

This is not a claim that barbecues matter more than defence. It is a claim about repetition, which is the only thing any word cloud can measure. Three mentions beats two mentions, and the picture is honest about that even when the picture is faintly ridiculous.

Worth holding on to next time someone shows you a word cloud of their customer feedback and calls it a finding.

What the cloud cannot see

The best word of the session appears twice, which is nowhere near enough to register.

Kemi Badenoch, winding up her six questions: “isn’t it time for the Prime Minister to ditch the vibes and get serious about defending our nation?” A while later, a Labour backbencher on the same subject: “vibes alone just will not be enough.”

Two uses, one from each side of the House, the second plainly enjoying the first. No frequency count will ever find that. Counting is a blunt instrument and it is blunt in a particular direction — it finds the bulk and misses the barb. The cloud tells you where to start reading. It does not do the reading for you.

Who did the talking

The Prime Minister used 3,557 words. All twenty-one other MPs, put together, used 2,935.

His average answer ran to 132 words and his longest to 239. The Speaker eventually stepped in: “I admire his answering questions in detail, but my problem is I am not going to get through the list.”

His shortest answer of the day was 23 words, and arrived when he was asked to state the fiscal rules: “No borrowing to fund day-to-day spending, debt falling as a percentage of GDP by the end of the Parliament, and yes, we will.”

Make of that what you like. We only counted.

Method. Full transcript of Prime Minister’s Questions, House of Commons, 2 September 2026, from Hansard, reused under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0. 6,558 words. Phrase length up to four words, combination counting, WordCloud+ English stop word list plus the forms of address listed above. Both clouds were made and exported in WordCloud+.