Rayner grills Raab over Lebedev and Saudi oil

When Angela Rayner faces Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions, it is obvious that both sides rather enjoy the exchanges. When she’s up against Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, as she was today, it feels like more of a grudge match. The session naturally centred around Ukraine, but as is Rayner’s habit, it was more political than previous PMQs.

Labour’s deputy made her theme the government’s failure to ensure Britain’s oil security and links to Russian oligarchs. Much of her attack was about flaws in the absent Prime Minister’s own character: the first question was whether Johnson’s comments about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe when he was Foreign Secretary had made the situation worse. Then she spent three questions on the allegations that Johnson had overruled security advice to not offer a peerage to Evgeny Lebedev.

Raab’s strategy for these questions was largely to scold Rayner, telling her that she ‘should know better’ than to complain about a peerage for someone who had made a contribution to society, and that she was talking ‘sheer nonsense’ when she asked if Johnson had requested that the security services revise their assessment of Lebedev (though he didn’t engage directly with that question).