The adversarial register of political questioning proves a completely different skill from academic scrutiny
I Was Invited to Give Evidence to a Select Committee and Completely Froze During the Practice Session
Following the policy meeting I wrote about a few weeks back, the connection has developed further than I anticipated: I’ve been invited to give written and oral evidence to a select committee examining development finance reform, my first ever formal parliamentary evidence session, and want to record honestly how completely I froze during the practice run my supervisor arranged, despite feeling reasonably composed heading into it.
What the Practice Session Actually Involved
My supervisor arranged a mock session with two colleagues playing the role of committee members, asking the kind of pointed, occasionally hostile questions a real select committee might pose, designed specifically to test whether I could hold my research’s core argument together under genuinely adversarial questioning rather than the more collegial academic environment I’m used to defending work within.
The Moment I Actually Froze
About ten minutes in, one colleague, playing a deliberately skeptical committee member, asked a fairly aggressive, simplified version of a critique I’d handled comfortably in my actual viva weeks earlier, but delivered with a tone and pace considerably more confrontational than any academic examiner had used, and I found myself, genuinely, unable to produce a coherent response for what felt like an excruciatingly long silence, my mind simply blanking entirely under a register of challenge I hadn’t adequately prepared for.
What This Revealed About the Actual Skill Gap
I’ve been reflecting since on how different the skill of holding an argument together under genuine academic scrutiny turns out to be from the skill of doing so under the specific, faster-paced, more adversarial register of political questioning, where the goal from the questioner’s side isn’t necessarily genuine inquiry but often political point-scoring, and where a witness needs to defend substance while also managing tone, pace, and public perception in ways a viva simply never requires.
How I’ve Actually Been Preparing Since
My supervisor, considerably more experienced with this specific format, has been running me through several further practice sessions, focusing specifically on the pacing and tone challenges rather than the substance, which she rightly points out I already have solid command of, teaching me techniques for buying genuine thinking time within an answer without appearing evasive, and for staying anchored to my core argument even when a question is deliberately trying to pull me into unfamiliar or hostile territory.
The Specific Technique That’s Actually Helped Most
The single most useful thing I’ve learned across these sessions is a simple reframing technique, restating a hostile or leading question in my own, more neutral terms before answering it, which both buys genuine processing time and prevents me from inadvertently accepting a framing that misrepresents my actual research, a skill that apparently takes considerably more deliberate practice to execute smoothly than it sounds in the abstract.
The Wider Reading I Found On This
I found a genuinely useful piece over at The London Prat about academics giving evidence to parliamentary committees for the first time, several researchers describing almost exactly this same gap between academic and political registers of scrutiny, and offering similar practical techniques for managing the specific pressures of committee questioning without compromising the actual substance of the evidence being given.
Counting Down to the Real Session
The actual evidence session is now just under two weeks away, and I have, considerably to my relief, stopped freezing during the practice runs, though I suspect nothing will fully replicate the actual pressure of a genuine committee room until I am sitting in one. I intend to keep practicing daily until then, and to write about how the real thing actually goes once it happens.
More of my research and politics chronicles live at my author page, and the piece about academics and parliamentary evidence is over at The London Prat.
I have also started keeping a small private log of every question that trips me up during these practice sessions, not to eliminate the possibility of freezing entirely, which I suspect is unrealistic, but to at least recognize the specific shape of it faster next time it happens. Whatever the real session brings, I suspect the log itself will prove more valuable than any single answer I manage to perfect in advance. Preparation, I am slowly learning, is less about eliminating every possible surprise and more about building the kind of steady footing that lets a surprise simply be a surprise rather than a catastrophe. Two weeks feels like both plenty of time and nowhere near enough, which I suspect is exactly the right amount of nervous anticipation for something this genuinely new. I suspect the nerves themselves will never fully disappear, and I have decided that is probably exactly as it should be for something this genuinely consequential. Whatever the actual committee room turns out to demand of me, I would rather arrive slightly over-rehearsed than under-prepared, even knowing now how imperfectly rehearsal actually maps onto the real thing. The room ahead of me in two weeks will be the real test, but I feel, for the first time in this whole process, genuinely ready to meet it as it actually is rather than as I imagined it might be.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/