Prime minister's question time was dominated by exchanges between the party leaders who rehearsed many of the arguments already aired in the opening skirmishes of a spring election campaign.

Tony Blair came under particular pressure, from both William Hague and Charles Kennedy on the issue of police numbers.

As exchanges on Wednesday between Labour and Conservative increased in ferocity Blair quoted extracts from the website of Nigel Hastilow, Conservative PPC for Edgbaston and previously unknown to national politics, using his comments on the Tories - a "lost cause", "madness" and in "crisis", and the economy - "never had it so good" to combat Hague's allegations of "broken promises".

The high-profile use of a political website - the first in the 2001 election campaign - has renewed discussion of how politicians use the web.