Pity the poor members of the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee whose performance yesterday – with some notable exceptions – has been widely panned.

The Murdoch session received wall-to-wall coverage here in Canada and some of the comments about the MPs’ performance make me squirm in embarrassment.

The Toronto Star’s Heather Mallick wrote, a tad unfairly:

“The disgraced police officers had to face the Home Affairs Select Committee which is where the best and the brightest MPs sit. Great good fortune placed the Murdochs in front of the second-raters at Culture Media and Sport, which is basically a wad of mumblers.”

Ouch!

In Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, the editorial savaged the Committee under the headline: 

“A pie for the politicians, too.”

It went on:

“It was not only Rupert Murdoch who took a pie in the face – the Culture Media and Sport committee of the British House of Commons looked amateurish and did not get clear answers about his complicity in phone hacking at News Corp.”

Asking pertinent questions that follow a coherent line, listening to the answers and thinking on your feet is not always as easy as it looks.

When I was in the old gasworks as a member of the Public Administration Select Committee I screwed up often enough. Fortunately, I didn’t have a global audience to worry about.

So, what lessons should we draw from yesterday’s marathon session?

There is a clear case for Committee members receiving training and coaching in how to interrogate witnesses. This means cutting out the waffle and asking crisp, clear questions in simple, straightforward English.

The Committee chair has a huge responsibility. He or she should intervene, whenever necessary, to keep questions on the fairway and out of the rough.

MPs should think about the questions they ask, avoiding, at all costs, reading metronomically from a script prepared earlier. This makes everyone cringe.

And do we really need Committee members to have 10 minutes each, Buggins’ turn, to ask their own little block of questions?

Why not allow the Tom Watsons of this world more time to pursue a line of questions that may produce results?

Above all, the Committee should agree beforehand the key issues it wants to focus on, with the Chair allowing members to come in on a particular point if they have spotted something that others have missed and is in danger of being lost.

Anyway, a word of comfort… the caravan moves on and the Culture, Media and Sport Committee will live to fight another day – but never again with the world watching.

As for the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks… They knew nothing, heard nothing and saw nothing. They displayed little curiosity in the methods used by the NoTW to get its regular sensational scoops.

They had no knowledge of money being paid out to shady characters. We are invited to believe the sums weren’t big enough to merit their attention.

For me, James Murdoch took the Oscar for best actor when he told the Committee he had no idea that News International was paying the legal fees of the convicted private investigator, Glen Mulcaire. He was “surprised” when he found out.

That one really made me laugh out loud.