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| An empty chair was prepared for Mark Zuckerberg |
For three hours this week Richard Allan was in one of the world's most uncomfortable seats.
On this week's Tech Tent podcast, we ask whether - beyond the theatre - we learned anything new from the inquisition of Richard Allan.
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He was on the back foot as the politicians accused his company of everything from playing fast and loose with user data, to aiding repression in Myanmar and threatening democracy around the world.
The best zinger came from a Canadian MP who said: "Our democratic institutions have been upended by fratboy billionaires from California, and Mr Zuckerberg's decision not to appear speaks volumes".
But what everyone was waiting to find out about was those internal Facebook documents seized from a businessman who is in a legal dispute with the social media giant.
In the event, the committee chairman Damian Collins opted not to publish the documents immediately.
But he did pluck one email from the pile. It was from a Facebook engineer in 2014 apparently sounding the alarm about a high level of Russian activity, with three billion data points a day being accessed from Russian IP addresses.
Richard Allan did not really have an answer when asked what action had been taken about this warning.
Later, Facebook published the whole email chain which appeared to show that the engineers who had raised the issue subsequently concluded that there was not actually clear evidence of Russian activity.