Keir Starmer had a much more awkward Prime Minister’s Questions than he is accustomed to. This was largely because Kemi Badenoch was armed with the latest unemployment figures, but also because the Conservative leader was agile in dealing with the Prime Minister’s responses. However, the overall lesson from the session was that Starmer now wants to frame the next election as being a battle between Labour and Reform, with the Tories a ‘finished party’.
Badenoch opened by saying the attacks on Keir Starmer’s home were unacceptable, and an attack on democracy. She then asked him why unemployment was rising, to which he replied that she was talking the country down. Then Badenoch had a good quote from a department store, Beales, which is having a ‘Rachel Reeves closing down sale’. Starmer replied:
Starmer’s grumpiness was evident with other MPs later on too
She must be the only person left in the country who thinks the economy was booming after the last government. We’ve created new jobs, record investment, trade deals…
He then listed the ways the Tories had talked about trade deals which they had then failed to get, adding: ‘A once great political party is sliding into brain-dead oblivion’. Starmer was right to highlight the Tory messaging meltdown over the trade deals: the party really could have done better in its response, and has been suffering from a lack of policy and direction. But his line about ‘brain-dead oblivion’ was a striking one and clearly planned, given he continued to develop that theme throughout his later answers.
Badenoch had a good line that she welcomed Starmer’s ‘tiny tariff deal’, which she delivered in a voice heavily buttered with sarcasm. The Prime Minister didn’t like that – and clearly took it a bit personally. He retorted that ‘I think she just said a tiny tariff deal’, and told her to catch the train to Solihull to speak to the workforce at JLR ‘to tell them she would rip up the deal that protects their jobs’, and then onto Scunthorpe ‘and tell the steelworkers there she’s going to rip up the deal that saves their jobs’. He added she should then go to Scotland ‘and then come back here next week and tell us what reaction she got’.
It was a well-crafted list of things Badenoch should do, clearly prepared in advance, but presumably Starmer had not also rehearsed its delivery in the tetchy tone he adopted in the Chamber. That grumpiness – rather reminiscent of Rishi Sunak on his fasting days – was evident with other MPs later on too.
The pair also had an exchange where they both told one another that they needed to listen to business, which was almost as tiresome as listening to leaders training apparently contradictory figures about the number of doctors in the NHS. Speaking of the NHS, up popped Ed Davey for his questions, where he expressed concerns about social care workers and whether the government would introduce a higher minimum wage for them. He then turned to Gaza and whether Starmer would call Donald Trump and ask him to recognise Palestinian statehood. Starmer responded that the situation in Gaza was ‘simply intolerable and getting worse’, but he did not take the Trump bait.
He did, though, take the bait from Plaid Cymru’s Westminster leader Liz Saville Roberts, who asked him whether there was any belief Starmer had which survived a week in Downing Street. He retorted very swiftly ‘yes, the belief that she talks rubbish!’ which drew some pantomime ooohs around the Chamber, and also underlined that Starmer was not in a good mood today. He was notably less savage towards Nigel Farage when the Reform leader got up to joke that ‘you seem to be learning a very great deal from us’. Starmer took that question as another opportunity to attack the Tories, who he once again denounced as ‘just finished’ as a project when responding to a Conservative MP.
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