Sunak had a strong comeback to Starmer’s Truss attack at PMQs

Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions was a classic knockabout between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer clearly written by their respective attack units. Both came armed with the sort of material you’d expect for a scrap: the Labour leader had a ‘rare unsigned copy’ of Liz Truss’s book, while the Prime Minister wanted to talk about Angela Rayner’s tax affairs. There were the familiar lines, too, including Sunak reminding the Commons of Starmer defending Hizb ut-Tahrir, and Starmer talking about his legal expertise.

The first question from Starmer was whether Sunak had met anyone with a mortgage who agreed with Truss that her mini-budget was the ‘happiest moment of her premiership’. Labour MPs laughed, while the Prime Minister responded that his counterpart should spend less time reading ‘that book’, and more time looking into his deputy’s tax advice. 

Starmer did mount a defence of Rayner: he said a ‘billionaire prime minister’ whose family had managed to avoid tax was ‘smearing a working class woman’.