PMQs: Johnson comes out fighting

Today’s PMQs was as dramatic as you might expect. It began with the spectacle of Bury South MP Christian Wakeford being cheered as he crossed the floor to the Labour benches. Sir Keir Starmer was in a joyful mood, as you might also expect. What was striking was how energised Boris Johnson was in his responses.

Johnson will have had a couple of minutes to prepare for a session about the shock defection of one of his own Red Wall MPs, and he clearly had decided that the best way to deal with this was to fight his way through the session rather than appearing sorrowful. He shouted across the chamber that Bury South had gone Conservative for the first time in a generation under his premiership and that it would return to the Tories at the next election too. The trouble for Johnson is that while Wakeford accepts the first assertion he has clearly calculated that the prediction about the next election isn’t true, hence his defection.