This was always going to be Kemi Badenoch’s week for PMQs.
The Conservative leader often struggles to make the headline topics of the new agenda work for her in her head-to-head matches with Keir Starmer – not least because so many of them (a stalling economy, NHS waiting lists, the breakdown in public services) say just as much about the record of the Conservative government she was part of as they do about Labour. But after the Supreme Court ruled last week that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex – an issue on which Badenoch has been more passionate and vocal than any other over her political career – nothing was going to stand in her way.
Her strategy was twofold: to showcase her own credentials on the contentious topic of gender ID and women’s spaces, and to highlight Starmer’s inconsistency over the issue. “Does the Prime Minister now accept… that he was wrong?” Badenoch began, as she listed Starmer’s past assertion that a trans woman was a woman. She then pressed him on whether he would apologise to the independent MP Rosie Duffield, who quit the Labour party last year after repeatedly clashing with the leadership on the subject.
The Prime Minister will have known full well what was coming, and he was ready – sort of. He repeated the language we have heard from officials and ministers in the past week about the government welcoming the “clarity” of the Supreme Court ruling and needing to “lower the temperature” of this debate. He also sought to challenge Badenoch on her record, accusing her of doing “precisely nothing” to protect women when she was women and equalities minister.
This is a charge Starmer likes to make against the Tory leader when it is business or international trade matters on the agenda, pointing out how ineffectual (or, indeed, counter-productive) she was in government. And it’s a charge Bridget Phillipson tried to make against her on the subject of women’s spaces when the education secretary gave a statement to the Commons last night, arguing Badenoch “had 14 years to provide clarity on the issues they may now claim to take an interest in…But they didn’t.”
Usually, it works. This time, however, Badenoch came prepared. She was able to reel of a list of everything she had done on the issue of biological sex – stopping the SNP’s gender recognition bill in Scotland, helping to commission the Cass Review, changing the guidance on single-sex toilets, drawing attention to the issue of puberty blockers – and of the opposition she faced from Labour MPs while she was doing it. She even got in a particularly well-honed jibe about Starmer “waiting for what Morgan McSweeney thinks” – a line that drew winces from the Labour benches, where there is some consternation about the Prime Minister appearing to delegate so much domestic policy to his chief of staff.
How well Starmer did depends on whether or not you think this issue is the hot-button dividing line Badenoch believes it to be. Anyone who has been paying attention to politics will know that Labour has dramatically changed its position on the question of what is a woman over the past few years, as the Tory leader claims, however much ministers try to imply otherwise. That said, Starmer’s position now of accepting the Supreme Court ruling and promising to protect women’s spaces while respecting the rights and dignity of trans people is probably closest to where most voters are – and takes the heat out of the issue. Badenoch can rage that she was right all along, but that doesn’t necessarily help her all that much except with voters – who are, let’s face it, already with her.
The real danger for Starmer is the disunity in the Labour party, which Badenoch gleefully brought up with regards to Labour MPs starting WhatsApp groups to try to overturning the Supreme Court ruling. But if we’re talking about MPs in unhelpful WhatsApp groups, the Conservatives have their own problems – a point Starmer used to turn the debate to shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick and his evident leadership ambitions.
All in all, it was a feisty back-to-school session. Badenoch will be pleased with her performance, not least her line that Starmer “doesn’t have the balls” to do the right thing. It was undoubtedly her best PMQs yet – something she can cling on to as her party faces near-annihilation in next Thursday’s local elections.
But if Badenoch was hoping Starmer would crumble in the force of her attack, she will be disappointed. The Prime Minister did not have the upper-hand, but his deflections – accusing Badenoch of losing control of her party, reminding the House that few Tory MPs expect her to remain as leader for long, punching the bruise that is the threat of Reform on the Conservatives’ right flank – did their job. Badenoch won, but it was on points rather than a knock-out blow. And she can’t hope to get the topic of her dreams every week.
[See more: Steve Reed: “Reform is a symptom of broken trust”]
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