Why MPs' best ripostes get left out of Hansard Hansard is not totally unexpurgated, as I know from personal experience, having worked in the House of Commons in the 1980s. I remember a debate about AIDS in which a Labour MP used the F-word to illustrate his point that we needed to talk frankly about sex to young people. The word was omitted from the printed transcript of the debate on the instructions of the then Speaker, Bernard Weatherill. Four-letter words, as he saw it, had no place in the hallowed pages of the Official Report. Now that parliamentary proceedings are televised, the discrepancies between Commons debates and the sometimes slightly sanitised versions of those debates which appear in Hansard have become more apparent. That is particularly true of Prime Minister's Questions, when there is such a rich and raucous cacophony, with hundreds of MPs making farmyard noises at the same time, that no shorthand-writer on the planet could do it justice. If you browse Hansard reports of PMQs online, you will regularly come across the catch-all phrase, 'interruption," as in: "The Hon. Gentleman is talking through his hat. Interruption.  But what form that interruption took will remain obscure. It could be anything from Labour MPs yelling "Liar!" to Tory MPs hissing Ed Balls to Liberal Democrat MPs slow-handclapping or doing a Mexican wave. The whole flavour of the occasion is lost. As befits an official record, written for the ages, Hansard is better at capturing the solemnity of Parliament than its lighter moments: the off-the-cuff asides that have the whole House in stitches. Many of the most memorable moments in parliamentary debates - a lot of them anthologised in Order! Order! by Robert Rogers - have been provided by sedentary interventions which never find their way into Hansard. Typical was an exchange in the 1990s between well-fed Tory grandee Nicholas Soames, then an agriculture minister, and wisecracking Labour backbencher Tony Banks. "We're not trying to cover the countryside in aspic," announced Soames, explaining government policy on the preservation of rural areas. "Just as well, as you'd eat it," muttered Banks, to gales of laughter. Another well-fed Tory MP of the era, James Hill, was on the receiving end of a similar Banks barb. "I have been personally targeted," huffed Mr Hill, having received hate mail in the post. "Blimey, that was hardly precision bombing," came a loud stage whisper, unrecorded in Hansard. There will always be a place for Hansard, whether it is the online version or the bound volumes. Why have parliamentary debates at all if they are not worthy to be recorded for posterity? But it can only ever tell half the story. For all its faults, the House of Commons is far more fun than its critics acknowledge.