The day before the local elections really isn’t the time for the leader of the opposition to fade into the background. Yet somehow, this is exactly what Kemi Badenoch managed to do in today’s PMQs.
Last week, Badenoch got to lead on her favourite political topic thanks to the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces and the legal definition of a woman. This week, she appeared to have been handed more killer ammunition by none other than Tony Blair, whose institute released a report yesterday which suggested the government’s net zero efforts are doomed. This should be catnip for a Tory leader who has made breaking the cross-party consensus on net zero one of her few policies. Her arguments have been turbocharged by the electricity outages in Spain and Portugal, which have raised questions about the reliability of renewable energy sources. (Sammy Wilson of the DUP made exactly is this point later in the session.)
Bizarrely, Badenoch declined to take the bait. Instead, she chose to relitigate an issue from January: the reluctance of the government to hold a national inquiry on the grooming gangs scandal that saw thousands of white girls raped and trafficked by men of predominantly British-Pakistani heritage. “Does the Prime Minister think we should expose this cover-up?” she wanted to know. Then, ignoring Keir Starmer’s reminder that she didn’t seem to care much about this issue when she was a minister in the Tory government, “Is he dragging his heels on this because he doesn’t want Labour cover-ups exposed?”
The charge of a cover-up comes straight out of the right-wing Twittersphere and has been fuelled by the likes of Elon Musk and his online denizens, some of whom seem to believe Starmer is personally responsible for crimes that took place decades ago. In some cases, it strays dangerously close to conspiracy theory. The issue is back in the news again this week after the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips spoke about it in the House on Monday and admitted there had been local cover-ups at the time, reigniting calls for a national inquiry instead of the five local inquiries the government has agreed to.
But a cynical Westminster watcher might wonder whether Badenoch’s motivation for making this the centre of her PMQs performance this week has more to do with how effectively Reform has used the rape gangs scandal to attack both the Tories and Labour in its local elections messaging. The Conservative leader tried repeatedly to lay the blame for decades of inertia at Starmer’s feet. She said: “If I were standing where he is, we would have had a national inquiry months ago.”
Unfortunately, she ran into the same problem as the last time she tried to talk about rape gangs: her own record. Badenoch had no answer to Starmer pointing out how little she and her party had done on the issue, contrasting it with his own personal achievements as director of public prosecutions. Badenoch did get in a good line that Starmer “is not the director of public prosecutions anymore” and should be looking to the future rather than the past, but this did little to burnish her own party’s credentials.
All in all, her performance served as little more than a reminder of a big Tory failure. Badenoch tried half-heartedly to tie the issue to the local elections, flagging all the places she’d visited on the campaign trail and insisting the issue was personal to her because she’d met with the victims. It was an odd line, though, coming from someone who admitted back when the scandal first broke that she hadn’t bothered to meet any of the survivors. Then Labour MP Nadia Whittome stood up to accuse her of “weaponising victims of child sexual abuse”.
A far more effective local elections strategy was on display from both Ed Davey and Nigel Farage.
The Lib Dem leader began by congratulating Mark Carney on his election victory in Canada and pointing out that the US was increasingly proving itself to be an unreliable ally. He repeated the regular Liberal Democrat request that MPs should get a vote on any UK-US trade deal – a request Starmer brushed off, but that cements Davey’s image as leader of the party most willing to stand up to Donald Trump. The Lib Dems are finding Trump is a potent source of anger on the doorsteps, not just from those with a liberal internationalist (read: Lib Dem) outlook but increasingly from the so-called quiet patriots – former Tory voters concerned about disruption to the international order. The Lib Dems are hoping to make sweeping gains tomorrow and counter the narrative that Reform is the default home for voters disaffected with both main parties.
[See also: The Lib Dems’ Middle England revolution]
Speaking of Reform, Farage lambasted Starmer in the chamber on his failure to “smash the gangs” (I warned earlier this month that talking tough on illegal immigration could be a big risk for Labour) and remind everyone that his party hopes to win the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. Starmer responded with every anti-Farage attack line he had: that a vote for Reform was “a vote to charge for the NHS, a pro-Putin foreign policy and a vote against workers’ rights”. Oh, and that Farage had “recruited Liz Truss as his new top adviser”. Last week, I wrote about the debate within Reform on whether the party would be mad to accept a Truss defection. Starmer’s eagerness to use the former PM as a weapon against any party she is remotely associated with will no doubt be noted as a warning.
Both Davey and Farage are a headache for Starmer, with their strong local election messages and Labour votes drifting off in all directions thanks to the government’s unpopularity. But the Prime Minister seemed genuinely upbeat when he noted that, tomorrow, voters will “pass their verdict on the leader of the opposition”. The vibe from today’s PMQs is that, however worried Starmer is, he can at least be relaxed about Kemi Badenoch.
[See more: Bonfire of the bureaucrats]
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