Keir tells Kemi that a phone ban in schools is ‘completely unnecessary’

Any session of Prime Minister’s Questions that takes place before a fiscal event is merely a warm-up act that everyone forgets within seconds, but today Keir Starmer made that warm-up a bit more closely connected to the Spring Statement by insisting to the chamber that ‘I have full confidence in the Chancellor’. He was answering a question from Conservative MP Jerome Mayhew, who claimed that Rachel Reeves’s ‘plans have collapsed around her ears with an emergency budget to cut that spending’. 

Kemi Badenoch, though, gave a nod to the Spring Statement, before focusing her questions on education. She did so in her characteristically unorthodox manner, and this time, it didn’t quite work. The Tory leader started off with a question about banning phones in schools, presumably because it was a tangible policy issue that gets people’s attention immediately. She wanted to know why Labour MPs had voted against a ban on phones in schools last week.