“The Prime Minister still seems fairly well liked”, said the SNP’s leader in Westminster, Dave Doogan, during a question on the cost of living “and I’ll let you into a wee secret. I quite like the new Prime Minister”. Burnham smiled: “can I thank him for his faint praise, and say: it will get him, er, everywhere.”
Doogan was not the only one who seemed prepared to give Burnham another relatively easy PMQs. There was more agreement from Ed Davey, who seems keen to engage with the Burnham doctrine of “problem solving, not point scoring”. The dialogue between the two men about the woeful conditions in Britain’s maternity wards – in one, Davey highlighted, the ceilings are falling in and the ventilation is so poor that temperatures reach levels that are dangerous to newborns – that at times it may have been possible to imagine that this wasn’t PMQs at all, but a productive discussion about things that genuinely matter, by people with a real intention to change them.
Fortunately Kemi Badenoch was there to dispel any such notion, and to provide the type of needlessly divisive back-and-forth for which PMQs is better known. Even Badenoch, however, has adapted to a different opponent. Her vicious personal barbs she threw at the Labour front bench during the Starmer-Reeves era landed because the former PM was, at that point, as popular as a flatulent busker on a crowded train. She seems to understand that she cannot be as nasty to the new PM, at least not until the public tires of him.
Badenoch repeated the question she had asked last week: where is the defence spending increase over which the former defence secretary, John Healey, resigned? Was he right to resign? Burnham repeated the answer he have last week: it’s in the upcoming spending review, and yes, Healey was appointed as Chancellor precisely because he’d refused to oversee the defunding of Britain’s armed forces.
Given that it was the Conservatives who slashed billions from defence spending, Burnham added, “I don’t feel you get the right to come to this house and point fingers and claim the moral high ground”. Woah there: pointing fingers and claiming the moral high ground is exactly what PMQs is for! “I will not be taking any lectures from him”, Badenoch declared, apparently keen to show that she was equally capable of missing the point of PMQs, which is to take lectures (dressed up as questions) from other politicians.
“It would be better to work across the floor of this house”, Burnham said in response to Badenoch’s questions on defence spending, and “I invite her to work with us on that”. It’ll be interesting to see how the Nice Guy Andy strategy evolves over time, against an opposition leader who is as co-operative as a saltwater crocodile that’s missed three meals in a row.
Burnham seemed a little less self-assured than he did last week, with the occasional slip. He described the problem of Neets as “something left behind by the last government”, without clarifying that he meant the last Conservative government (the previous government was run by Keir Starmer). But now he gets five weeks off from PMQs, thanks to conference season, and he prepares to face his party in Liverpool. He’ll be hoping they, too, are prepared to be nice.
[Further reading: What we learned at PMQs: Burnham defends his Israel sanctions]
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