Rishi Sunak borrows from George Osborne’s playbook at PMQs

Rishi Sunak had a much better Prime Minister’s Questions than he might have expected, given the worrying economic news this morning. The Prime Minister sometimes turns up with too much, over-caffeinated energy. Sometimes he tries to defend his government with attacks on Labour that don’t sound as though he came up with them himself. But today he was confident and repetitive as he argued that the strategy he and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt were pursuing was the right one.

Keir Starmer led on inflation, quoting Conservative MP Lucy Allan’s warning that the country was facing a ‘mortgage catastrophe’. He asked if Sunak agreed with Allan. The PM replied:

‘It is also right that we do support those with mortgages and this is why the absolute right economic priority is to halve inflation. Because inflation is what is driving interest rates up, inflation is what erodes people’s savings and pushes up prices and ultimately makes them poorer.