Badenoch attacks Starmer over rape gangs

All politics is local – and no more so than this week. With various voters set to head to the polls across England tomorrow, the different party leaders were hoping to land their last-minute messages at today’s session of Prime Ministers’ Questions. For Kemi Badenoch, the approach seems to have been ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Labour’s stubborn refusal to hold a national inquiry into rape gangs is clearly making their front bench uncomfortable, months after the subject was first raised. So Badenoch chose to spend all six questions on the theme, winning today’s session comfortably.

For the first half of the exchange, it was pretty much a stalemate between the two. Badenoch raised Jess Phillips’s comments on Monday, admitting that there had been a cover-up: ought the government not try to expose this? Starmer responded, slightly stiffly, listing his own record as Director for Public Prosecutions.