Where Kemi Badenoch keeps going wrong at PMQs

Kemi Badenoch may well have been right in the points that she made at Prime Minister’s Questions, but she managed to go about making them in the wrong way. The Tory leader focused on the many contradictions between the government’s focus on economic growth and its policies, but her phrasing of her questions and her attempts to defend the Conservative legacy made it easy for Keir Starmer to ridicule the questions, rather than answer them.

The Prime Minister had also set up a planted question before his exchanges with Badenoch which meant he was already developing a theme about the Tories and the state pension before the leader of the opposition had even stood up. Labour backbencher Damien Egan asked Starmer to confirm that Labour would ‘always protect the state pension and the triple lock’, which Starmer duly did. Badenoch then quoted Starmer’s own ‘growth test’, that if a policy was not good for growth then he would not approve it.