Sunak and Starmer risk getting too comfortable at PMQs

Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak seem to be settling into a comfortable but largely unremarkable slanging match at each Prime Minister’s Questions. Today the pair traded one-liners about each other while failing to land any blows or indeed move the political debate along at all.

The Labour leader opened by condemning Fifa and the behaviour of the Qatari regime during the men’s football World Cup, before performing a handbrake turn to talking about the economy. Sunak had been leafing through his briefing notes to find the section on Qatar, but found himself instead responding to a question about why Britain faces the lowest growth of any OECD country over the next two years.

The Prime Minister argued that his government was going to deliver more growth, before advising Starmer that ‘if the Labour Party is serious about actually supporting growth, maybe they should get on the phone with their union paymasters’.