Keir Starmer stepped up to the despatch box this afternoon for his first PMQs since he resigned. As he shuffled into the chamber and took his seat on the front bench, the Prime Minister received a bigger cheer from the Labour benches than he has in recent months.
Opening the session with the usual procedural spiel, he told MPs that his day would be made up of “meetings with ministerial colleagues and others”. One of his colleagues couldn’t resist. “Andy?” they shouted. Starmer chuckled. “Not today.”
Kemi Badenoch, on the other hand, let rip. No one was safe from her rampage: Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband and Bridget Phillipson were each subjected to a beating. “I want to start by congratulating the Prime Minister,” Badenoch said, opening her six questions, “He’s the only party leader who won a by-election last week.” But of course, there was a punchline. “I am much happier with my MP than he is,” she quipped. (Andy Burnham, the new MP for Makerfield, was conspicuously absent throughout this session of PMQs.)
Badenoch’s first target was the Chancellor. “She lives next door to him,” she said, sneering and pointing at Reeves, who was sat next to Starmer on the front benches, “but wouldn’t even come out to hear his resignation speech.” The Labour benches groaned. “She was too busy getting ready for a selfie with the new leader.”
Next up was Miliband. The Energy Secretary is rumoured to be a contender to replace Reeves in No 11, should Burnham take over. “He was a failed Labour leader,” Badenoch said, “who [the Prime Minister] brought back from the wilderness.” Miliband too was absent from the Chamber. “Where is he?” came a shout from the Tory benches. Then Badenoch got nasty. Pointing to Miliband’s closeness to Burnham, she said: “It’s not the first time he’s betrayed someone close to him.” (Miliband famously ran against, and beat, his older brother David to the Labour leadership in 2010.)
Then Badenoch turned on Phillipson. “Some of his cabinet have been loyal,” she began, pointing at the Education Secretary. It’s not been a good week for Phillipson. On Monday, a poll conducted by the National Education Union revealed that 74 per cent of teachers do not think she is doing a good job. Badenoch was keen to make use of this. “Hands up if you think the Education Secretary is doing a good job,” she said. A feeble selection of Labour MPs shot their hands up, while their colleagues shouted and jeered. The leader of the opposition ended her attack by describing Phillipson as a “spiteful class warrior”.
Eventually, Lindsay Hoyle was forced to intervene. Booming above the exchange of shouts and jeers across the Chamber, the Speaker asked his colleagues to think about their language. “Don’t be surprised if constituents think they can use the same language,” he said. His warning was echoed by the leader of the Lib Dems, Ed Davey, who unlike Badenoch, sounded almost misty eyed about the departing Prime Minister. Looking moodily across at the Tory leader, he described the PM’s resignation speech as an “important reminder… that we are all human”.
Starmer’s best jokes came in his exchanges with Davey. “I know, like me he’s been reflecting on his own career,” the PM mused, pointing to the Lib Dem’s recent revelation that he was approached for a job by MI6 while at Oxford in 1998 but decided to turn it down. “The whole house is wondering what might have been,” said Starmer, “00 Davey.” With a twinkle in his eye, the Lib Dem leader declined to comment. “I signed the Official Secrets Act,” he said.
The highlight of the session was a bizarre question from Desmond Swayne. The Tory MP for New Forest West often sits slouched in the corner of the second row of opposition benches. As he stood up, the whole house was likely anticipating another dig at the Prime Minister but instead, Swayne asked the pithiest question of Starmer’s 45-minute grilling: “Can [he] enlighten his party as to the moral of the cautionary tale of Jim who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion?”
The PM laughed. “The Honourable Gentleman is most generous,” he said, before recounting that while on holiday to the New Forest, he and his family had received a visitor who leaned through the door of their holiday cottage with a bottle of Champagne. The visitor, it turned out, was Swayne.
“I will certainly miss these exchanges,” Starmer told the house. If Burnham is able to run uncontested, then he only has three sessions of PMQs left. Today, the Prime Minister appeared to have come into his own. It’s a shame it took him two years and one resignation statement in order to do so.
[Further reading: The twilight of our European dream]
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