Where’s Sunak? Dowden steps in at PMQs

Where’s Rishi Sunak? That’s the latest attack line from Labour politicians after the Prime Minister missed this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions to attend a service for the NHS at Westminster Abbey. He will also miss next week’s affair to attend a Nato summit. In Sunak’s place, his deputy Oliver Dowden stood at the despatch box where he faced Keir Starmer’s deputy Angela Rayner. She quickly brought up Sunak’s absence, suggesting it showed that the Tories had given up. Dowden – who has several years’ experience writing jokes for Tory leaders for PMQs – snapped back that ‘some leaders trust their deputies’.

When pressed, there is no Labour frontbench politician who seems to directly be saying that Sunak should have missed the NHS service (which Keir Starmer also attended) or that Sunak should give Nato a miss next week. Speaking on the BBC’s Politics Live today, shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth suggested that Sunak’s sin was to not suggest that the service started at a different time when his team will have first got wind of it.