Kemi Badenoch tends to be a week late with the topics on which she chooses to challenge Keir Starmer. With recess, it has now been two weeks since the leader of the opposition comprehensively missed the open goal presented to her when Starmer announced that the government would be U-turning on cuts to winter fuel. Perhaps, they speculated, Badenoch would have “recess jetlag” and try to mention it anyway.
Recess jetlag sums it up. Whether Badenoch has spent two weeks kicking herself for seeming so unable to adapt her questions after the Prime Minister’s announcement, or whether (as her critics suggest) she remains incapable of ever admitting she has made an error, the Tory leader was back to take another bite at the winter fuel cherry. Following Rachel Reeves’ confirmation this morning that the payments would be reinstated (at a threshold yet to be confirmed) in time for this winter, Badenoch wanted to know how many pensioners would now be eligible. It’s a valid question (and one many Labour MPs fielding emails from angry constituents would like to know the answer to), but if the Tory leader did not foresee Starmer quipping back “I’m glad to see she’s catching up with what happened two weeks’ ago”, no one can help her.
The session went downhill from there. Badenoch’s tactic appeared to be to throw everything at the Prime Minister at once: the winter fuel allowance, the government’s Chagos deal, the OECD downgrading its growth prediction for the UK, the prospect of further tax rises, the two-child benefit cap, US tariffs on steel, and Starmer’s reliance on his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney.
If she was hoping at least some of this would stick, she will be disappointed. Focusing on the two-child benefit cap may have been an attempt to needle back-bench Labour MPs who are growing increasingly frustrated with the government (Gordon Brown certainly is – as you can hear in his interview with the New Statesman here), but given the Conservative position is to keep it in place, all Badenoch did was hand Starmer a chance to reiterate how much Labour cares about reducing child poverty. Similarly, her efforts regarding winter fuel enabled the Prime Minister to remind the House about the Tories’ mixed messaged on the pensions triple-lock.
Badenoch did get one good line in, observing “I asked the Prime Minister what he believes in; he had to look in his folder to find the answer”. For a moment, she almost seemed to be relaxing. But then she let Starmer get under her skin once more. The opposition leader, who week-by-week grows more frustrated by Starmer dodging her questions, appeared to lose it completely today. The PM was being even more tangential than usual. She had had enough. Her final question was more of a tirade, gabbled so quickly she could barely get the words out and was reduced to shouting “chaos, chaos, chaos”.
It was an unequivocal mess for Badenoch. But Starmer’s deflection tactics are hardly edifying either. The biggest laugh of the session went to Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, who scolded the House: “Please, let’s listen to the answer even if you don’t believe you’re getting one.” Later on, Starmer responded to an SNP question about Gaza by criticising the party’s position on the nuclear deterrent. Even Labour MPs looked a bit awkward at that one.
Then there was the maiden question from Reform’s new MP, Sarah Pochin. Starmer clearly knew this was coming, and had a spiel all ready about Nigel Farage’s “£80bn of unfunded tax cuts”, complete with a joke on how this was “Liz Truss all over again”, pointing out that Pochin was herself “a Conservative member when Liz Truss was leader”. (A reminder: Labour will be making as much of the Truss-Reform connection as it can, hoping the former PM’s toxicity rubs on Farage.) It was slick but obviously rehearsed, and Starmer struggled to pivot gracefully from the actual question, about banning the burqa. His refusal to engage with Pochin is to be expected (no one would anticipate Starmer getting drawn into a debate on the burqa, even if she tried to frame it around the EU). But the clunkiness of the response just drew attention to how reluctantly the PM seems to answer questions – and not just Badenoch’s.
Finally, for those of you playing PMQs bingo, Ed Davey continued to cement his anti-Donald Trump position, referring to the tariff news overnight as “classic Trump, changing the terms of a deal he has already agreed”. “I had hoped that the Prime Minister would start to see the kind of man that Trump is,” the Liberal Democrat leader said sadly, once again playing the Hugh Grant in Love Actually card. Interesting, there were two ruthlessly on-brand questions from Lib Dem MPs: one on Britain’s broken water system and sewage in rivers, and one on the impact of employers’ National Insurance rises on care providers and small businesses (plus a third on policing at Glastonbury). No recess jetlag for them. Davey’s party knows what its core issues are and is relentlessly disciplined on them. Another sign that there’s more than one opposition in this parliament.
[See more: Inside No 10’s new dysfunction]
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