Does the Department for Culture, Media and Sport provide adequate leadership to England's national museums?

The verdict was No, and a modest one: 16 votes to 12, a 14-point gap that speaks less of a rout than of a chamber leaning, but not lunging, towards the Public Accounts Committee's own scepticism about the department's hands-off approach.

The generational story is the one worth pausing on. The youngest cohort, just three voters, broke for Yes, and the platform's largest single bloc, 25-34s, split the vote exactly down the middle at 7-7. From 35 upward the mood hardens steadily against the department, with the 45-54s unanimous in their "no" and the older brackets, thin as they are, following the same drift.

That shape echoes a familiar pattern in how Britain argues about public institutions: younger voters more willing to give benefit of the doubt to arms-length governance, older voters more inclined to demand direct ministerial grip, whether the subject is the NHS, the BBC or, here, the National Gallery's cyber defences. Gender made almost no difference at all, men and women dividing in near-identical proportions, which suggests this was a judgment about Whitehall competence rather than culture-war terrain.

A committee's warning about strategic drift found an audience largely inclined to agree, but only after the chamber's youngest members made it a genuine contest.