Andy Burnham began his first Prime Minister’s Questions today by thanking the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, for his assistance with (or tolerance of) his marathon 125-question Q&A yesterday, which lasted for almost three and a half hours. The Commons has seen longer sessions (Disraeli devoted five hours to a Budget speech, while suffering from the flu), but not for a while. The two men shared a meaningful look and a chuckle; perhaps the Speaker had been forced to remind the PM that his chair, while richly ornamented, is not fitted with a flush.
Burnham seemed determined to press on with today’s PMQs, which ran on beyond the usual half-hour slot, and Hoyle asked him at one point to give snappier answers in order to fit in more questions from backbenchers. Burnham is not a thunderer at the despatch box or a lofty statesman-orator. At times he looks slightly embarrassed. He seemed to blush when Kemi Badenoch congratulated him on his stamina, and a couple of the more puerile members of the House chortled.
“A PM needs to be a leader, not a people-pleaser,” Badenoch told him, and in doing so she perhaps shed light on her own theory of government. If Kemi Badenoch gets to run the country, she will see to it that absolutely no one is pleased about anything.
But Badenoch also had more pertinent questions to ask. Having spent some of yesterday’s session telling Burnham what year it is and that being the Prime Minister is a difficult job, she moved on to trickier territory. “What exactly has he cut?” she asked, and this is a question worth asking; Burnham said yesterday that central government had become too large, and the spending review currently under way will have to involve settlements some departments will find painful. He had a decent line in response – “tax is the simple answer” – but not a substantive answer.
Badenoch also asked how Burnham plans to tackle rising debt costs, which was a tricky one for Burnham to answer, because he’s not the president of the United States or the governor of the Bank of Japan. There is very little any British prime minister can do about America’s $40trn debt pile or Japan’s tilt away from extreme monetary policy, both of which are much more important factors to global debt and currency markets than what Jim O’Neill (Burnham’s former economic adviser) said on the radio last night.
It was at this point that Badenoch wandered into uncertain fiscal waters. She asked if the PM would “rule out more borrowing”, which suggests a lack of awareness about the extent to which our government, like every other government, is borrowing constantly. She warned that “higher borrowing costs are the biggest threat to family finances”, which is true for some families at most: almost all mortgages are now issued at fixed rates, and most of those are fixed for five years. Inflation and the risk of recession are the biggest threats to family finances. Nevertheless, Burnham was able to continue to enjoy the fact that Badenoch has employed Andrew Griffith, one of the authors of the Truss mini-Budget – very much associated with borrowing costs in the public mind – as her new shadow chancellor. “They’re laughing, they’re laughing,” Badenoch told the Speaker. “I don’t know why they’re laughing.”
Even Burnham’s own backbenchers couldn’t have given him an easier ride than his new friend Ed Davey, however. The Lib Dem leader said he shared his analysis of the damaging effect of Brexit on the UK economy. “He is absolutely right to share the analysis I laid out yesterday,” replied Burnham with a chuckle. It’s almost as if these two leaders are thinking about the next election, now less than three years away, and the fact that the polls do not currently predict either of them to win a majority.
Then it was off to Instagram, where Burnham will shortly be answering “People’s Major Questions”. Perhaps the people will give him a harder time.
[Further reading: Three things we learned at PMQs]
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