It was the Prime Minister’s Questions after the elections before. Nigel Farage looked smug, seated alongside his new MP, after a stunning victory that takes Reform to five seats in the House of Commons, up from five at the general election.
Keir Starmer looked embattled. He can’t have thought the job would be easy. He’s no David Cameron or Boris Johnson, swanning into Downing Street with an assurance of belonging there. But did he realise it would be this hard, with every problem intractable and every option unaffordable?
Perhaps the bit of the problem he didn’t foresee was that, as well as having to deal with his own backbenchers and the Conservatives, he’d have to find a way to fight off Farage, whose stock of Simple Solutions For Complex Problems proved so attractive to voters of all stripes last week. Who’d have guessed the British public would come back for more from the man who sold them Brexit?
But the big surprise was Kemi Badenoch’s chipper mood. For days, we’ve been reading that the end of the Tory party was nigh, but there was no sign that she believed this. Is it possible that no one has told her about the local election results? Her MPs looked pretty happy too, but that may simply be because of the prospect of a leadership election, the only bloodsport they’re still allowed to enjoy.
“Does the prime minister now admit that he was wrong to remove the winter fuel payment from millions of pensioners?” Badenoch asked. That was it: she had concluded that every vote for Farage was, in a way, a vote for her. She is, Jeremy Corbyn-like, “winning the argument”.
Starmer rehearsed his usual answer: the £22 billion blackhole, the money for the NHS, the pensions triple lock. Usually, this would get rumbling bass note of support from his own side, but on Wednesday that noise was missing, as though the plug had been kicked out of the subwoofer. Instead Labour MPs looked glum and lost in thought. They haven’t absented themselves, as Tory MPs did for Johnson, but they definitely seemed to be harbouring a few doubts about their captain.
Badenoch listed all the people who think that means-testing the Winter Fuel Payment is a bad idea. “He’s refused to listen to me,” she declared, somewhat self-importantly. “Will he at least listen to his own party?”
Starmer replied that no one else seemed to have any ideas about how to pay for the things the country needs. “We wouldn’t balance it on the backs of pensioners!” Badenoch replied, and got possibly the biggest cheer she’s had from her own side since she took the job. A couple of seats down from her, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp was manspreading in support of her, hands on his knees in what seemed a bid to push them even further apart. Is he practising his yoga, or is he suffering from some terrible affliction that makes it impossible to put his legs less than 70 degrees apart? Please Chris, for all our sakes, see a doctor.
Ed Davey asked about Donald Trump’s announcement that he would put a huge tariff on foreign films. “If he picks a fight with James Bond, Bridget Jones and Paddington Bear, he will lose!” he declared, sounding like Winston Churchill being channelled by Alan Partridge. The chamber was quiet after this, too, as minds boggled at the mental image. Someone shouted for more, but it might have been ironic.
Later on, Conservative Stuart Andrew, who turns out to be Shadow Culture Secretary, asked the government an urgent question about film tariffs, declaring that Trump’s tweet might have been avoided if the government had just begun trade talks with the US earlier. There is some truly magical thinking going on among the Tories when it comes to Trump. They seem to have decided that he is a master strategist, leading them to tortuous rationalisations of his actions. Presumably it would be too traumatic to consider the possibility that the president has a limited grip on reality and no filter between his brain and his mouth.
We had been surprised last week when Badenoch had failed to raise Tony Blair’s comments on Net Zero, but she raised them this week instead. What she didn’t bring up was her criticism of the new trade deal with India, which exempts some Indians working in the UK from paying taxes both here and at home. This was clearly something of a disappointment to the prime minister, who decided to answer her point anyway, in reply to a quite different question from a Labour MP. “Incoherent nonsense!” he declared. “It’s in the agreements we’ve already got with 50 other countries.”
Later we would learn, via the Financial Times, that Badenoch had agreed the principle of avoiding double taxation in her own talks with the Indian government. She immediately denounced the story as lies, and we must take her at her word. With her famous grasp of detail, it’s impossible that she wouldn’t have known every nuance of the talks. But with opponents like this, there’s a reason Farage looks so smug.
