Keir Starmer will be relieved that this week’s PMQs session is over. The most difficult moments for the Prime Minister today came not from Kemi Badenoch, but questions asked by other MPs.
These covered all the things causing problems for the government this week: President Trump’s overnight bombshell that the US “will take over the Gaza Strip” (raised by Ed Davey), the bubbling row over whether Starmer broke lockdown rules in December 2020 by meeting with a voice coach (raised by the Conservative Gagan Mohindra), and the growing outrage and confusion over the suggestion Britain will pay the Mauritian government £18bn as part of the Chagos Island handover deal (raised by Nigel Farage).
So before we get to Badenoch, how did Starmer do? The Prime Minister had come prepared. To Davey, he offered a carefully worded contradiction to Trump’s suggestion of building “the riviera of the Middle East”, saying displaced Palestinians “must be allowed home. They must be allowed to rebuild. And we should be with them in that rebuild, on the way to a two-state solution.” But he didn’t respond to the Lib Dem leader’s question, “Does he personally believe that Trump recognises the danger of statements like this?”, in an attempt to make the UK government position clear without antagonising the US president.
On the subject of potentially breaking lockdown, Starmer went on the offensive. The right is split on how much to make of the revelations, reported in the new book Get In by political journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, that Starmer met a voice coach in December 2020, when London was under strict Covid restrictions, to help him prepare for a speech on Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal. Some see it as a real “gotcha” moment, a chance to bring the Labour PM down the same way Starmer himself used partygate to attack Johnson. Others question the wisdom of reminding the electorate of all the lockdown breaches committed by the Tories (something which still gets raised in focus groups even four years later).
Starmer took Mohindra’s question as an excuse to make this point decisively, citing “suitcases of booze into Downing Street” and “vomiting up the walls”. “I was working, they were partying,” he forcefully told the House. It’s too early to say how this subject will play out, but it was one of the PM’s more confident moments today.
As for Farage, someone in Starmer’s team must have anticipated that the Reform leader would be out fighting today. Before Farage was called on, the Labour backbencher John Slinger stood up to ask an almost certainly planted question about comments from the Honourable Member for Clacton that his party is “open to anything when it comes to changing our NHS”, including an insurance-based system. Expect to see this point raised more frequently as the government grows increasingly panicked about the rise of Reform (which overtook Labour in a YouGov poll this week) and looks for ways to attack Farage.
When it was his turn, Farage began by insisting that “Reform want healthcare to be free at the point of delivery”, at which point the House descended into chaos. “They really are panicking, aren’t they,” Farage smirked, as he was heckled with cries of “ask the question”. It was hardly edifying.
His actual question related to the Chagos deal, asking how he was meant to explain to constituents, including veterans, who have just lost their winter fuel allowance that the government is prepared “to give away a military base and pay £18bn for the privilege”.
It’s a valid and uncomfortable question for the government, which is perhaps why Starmer looked rattled and had no answer to Farage at all, beyond mocking him for hardly ever being in his constituency and reiterating the point about Reform being a risk to the NHS. Or perhaps the PM was flustered because he’d already used all his Chagos defence lines on Kemi Badenoch.
Which brings us back to the start of the session and what is normally the main event: the head-to-head with the leader of the opposition. Badenoch looked like she was going to focus on Chagos in her first question, accusing the government of an “immoral surrender so north London lawyers can boast at their dinner parties”. But she then swerved to ask about the government’s position on the Rosebank oil and gas licences.
Starmer looked thrown, and decided to give her his pre-prepared answer on Chagos anyway. His defence was that Badenoch clearly hadn’t been properly briefed on the topic she had not asked a question about – in fact, she hadn’t even asked for a briefing when he had generously offered her one, which made her “not fit to be prime minister” (remember: we’re not due another election for four years). Her counter was a reiteration of last week’s accusation that Starmer doesn’t know what’s going on in his own government.
What Badenoch was probably trying to do was draw all these disparate threads together under the theme of “when Labour negotiates, our country loses”. But it was a mess and her point got lost. The Prime Minister accused her yet again of playing “student politics”, but given his lurching non-sequiturs away from the topic he was actually being asked about, he didn’t have much in the way of the moral high ground. The saving grace for Starmer is that, as I’ve written before, of the two he always seems more across the facts of any particular issue than Badenoch.
The Tory leader did have one good line, pre-empting the point that would later be made by Farage: “He’s freezing pensioners, while shovelling money to Mauritius.” Labour should be intensely worried about the optics of the vast sums reportedly involved in the Chagos deal in light of the tight grip on the purse strings everywhere else. Maybe there is a genuine national security concern that no one outside government knows about, but the current strategy is not playing well.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, should be worried that their strongest piece of ammunition this week was thrown away and then used by the Reform leader instead. Badenoch gets six questions at PMQs. She shouldn’t be playing support to Nigel Farage.
[See more: How did Labour become so unpopular?]
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