Keir Starmer has not seemed in control of the grooming gangs story since it broke, but at Prime Minister’s Questions, he had a rare period of command. This was largely because he is more adept at answering questions than Kemi Badenoch currently is at asking them, and also because the Conservative line on this matter is muddled. The Prime Minister was able to dismiss Badenoch’s focus on grooming gangs as a recent interest, telling the Chamber:
Her recently acquired view that it’s a scandal, having spent a lot of time on social media over Christmas, not once in eight years did she stand here and say what she’s just said.
He also challenged her to tell MPs when she had raised the topic in the Commons in her eight years as a member, including during her time as a children’s minister and women and equalities minister. Badenoch complained in response that he was being ‘very specific’ because she would not have been able to raise the matter as a minister on the floor of the House, but that she had spoken about it in speeches elsewhere.
In (possibly inadvertent) inversion of the Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics about a modern major general, he urged MPs to defy the ‘misleading leadership of the leader of the opposition’ and not to vote to kill the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which they will vote on this afternoon.
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