‘Silly Season’ it certainly hasn’t been, but at least our political boys and girls have gone out to play and re-charge their batteries for one last push before the elections.

It wasn’t a totally clean break though. The last session dribbled away to the accompaniment of some pretty unseemly ‘demob-happy’ tweeting of personal insults, while Members were given some holiday food for thought courtesy of the unflattering results from a public opinion survey of their shenanigans.

Across the water, despite their own hols being rudely interrupted by the spate of urban anarchy, their Westminster counterparts are in recession too. It means I’m currently deprived of my late-night radio night-cap, ‘Today in Parliament’.

Apart from the occasional examples of erudite debate in their Lordships’ Chamber, the scrabble in what they quaintly refer to as ‘the other place’, can turn the programme into a pretty a scrappy comedy show, especially during Prime Minister’s Questions.

This features a level of ritual ranting and flamboyant obsequiousness the Tuesday morning performers in our own States Chamber can barely dream of.

Now, don’t get me wrong, a lot of good is done there, but as a regular visitor to the local isolation ward that is the Public Gallery, I can’t help feeling that Questions to the Council of Ministers, can resemble an occasion little short of a theatrical performance a couple of scripts short of a Green Room Club pantomime rehearsal. Members are in the habit of delivering prescribed ‘questions’ – some so convoluted they present a challenge to coherent reading skills, to respondents already fortified with their own Civil-Service prepared answers.

These aren’t the sort of questions you and I would recognise. They’re part of a ritual designed to shuffle issues back and forth with scant expectation of resolution.

They provide a device to register a Member’s presence in the Chamber, massage constituency vanity, and are delivered with a sideways glance to the press box, and the expectation of mass foot-stamping from the ‘usual suspects’. The answer is often irrelevant – either because the questioner has worked it out in advance in order to prepare a ‘clever’ supplementary or, more likely, the question itself possesses all the incisiveness of a second-class thesis from the University of the Blindingly Obvious.

I’d happily settle for fewer examples of the set-piece requests for information such as : ‘Will the Minister tell the House how many extra pencils were purchased to conduct the box-ticking exercise for the 2011 Public Spending Review?’

Followed by the crushingly penetrating supplementary: ‘And were they obtained from a local supplier, paying local tax?’ Of course, that example was purely fictitious, but all this music-hall obfuscation actually lets the potential ‘victim’ off the hook.

At least one serving Deputy has publicly accused Ministers of dodging questions – providing ‘wish-washy’ answers. His taunt of ‘well avoided, Minister, now can I ask you the real answer?’ is unlikely to unveil the response he desires – it’s not in the script.

There is indeed a legitimate need to challenge deliberately obstructive responses, but there’s also a responsibility to ask the right questions in the first place. One might also suggest that if Members were to remain long enough in the Chamber, they might actually hear something to their advantage!

Sadly, such exercises are commonplace throughout public life. Compare, if you will, those costly surveys which are contrived to produce exactly the results wished for in the first place. Take, for example, the scandalous waste of UK public money invested in the research – purportedly originated by the Prime Minister – to discover what makes people happy. £2m over two years, simply to let us know ‘officially’ that the British public values, health, family relations and clean streets.

It just so happens there’s a new kid on the block which could challenge the political game-players to get their Houses in order. It’s called an e-petition. It’s being rolled on the Westminster web-site.

The device is very simple, and works like this. If you can amass 100,000 signatures then your chosen subject may well be taken to the floor of the House of Commons. There’s a filtering system to prevent ludicrous or libellous issues finding their way through, but at least the sponsors of the site reckon it will provide a clearer mirror of matters of genuine public concern and spur on politicians to debate them.

There is, of course, a risk that the device could be hi-jacked by pressure groups, but if you took hanging, EU membership and Human rights – the three contentious issues that have bounced to the top of the UK agenda – and substituted them for immigration, GST and planning & development, local politicians could adopt something like it as a convenient barometer to address local pressure points.

However, let’s not get carried away and try to substitute all genuine debate with referendums – that’s a cop out. All the same, it they might serve as a counter to the preposterous disenfranchisement of a whole raft of local citizens as a result of the decision to reduce the quota of Senators. How the legislature can be taken seriously when it drops pan-island mandated representatives in favour of more parish-pump performers, will forever remain a blistering indictment of the existing Assembly and its vanity.

When the playmates return, their first priority will undoubtedly focus on winning back favours to ensure another season of parliamentary privilege. First though, we’ll be treated to the grand-standing ‘Carousel of the Candidates’ in October. That, at least, should provide the opportunity for the public to ask the questions that matter to them and decide whether well-rehearsed promises can any longer substitute for relevance and engagement. Prepare for serious holding of breath!