It was Chris Philp’s big moment, and he was nowhere to be seen. With Keir Starmer away at the G7, Wednesday was deputy PMQs, with Angela Rayner standing in for the prime minister. Kemi Badenoch has refused to appoint a deputy, preferring a strategy of letting anyone who isn’t Robert Jenrick stand in for her. This time it was the shadow home secretary’s turn.
But where was he? With three minutes to go, there was no sign of him. This was cutting it a little fine. Had he forgotten? No, there he was, hovering behind the Speaker’s chair, but then he turned around and left. Had he chickened out?
With one minute to go he appeared at the other end of the chamber, and, with a nervous nod to Lindsay Hoyle, he made his way into his seat with seconds to spare. He fiddled with his phone and with his pen. It was the moment that the understudy got to take the big role. Could he handle it? Philp is already so tightly wound that he’s squeezed his surname down to a single vowel. The last thing he needs is any more tension.
As he took his seat, his colleague Mims Davies was asking for assurances that the coming inquiry into grooming gangs would cover “previous Directors of Public Prosecutions”. The Tories seem to have convinced themselves that Starmer’s resistance to a public inquiry is rooted in a secret past as a sex trafficker, rather than every prime minister’s loathing of these things. It seems more likely that the hearings will prove awkward for the people who were in government over the last decade. Davies, for instance, spent a year as minister for safeguarding. Philp spent half of the last five years in the Home Office.
Before Philp could show us his stuff, the Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsey asked for assurances that parliament would get a vote before the RAF joined Israel’s attacks on Iran. Rayner swerved, because no government wants to feel that it needs to consult the Greens before bombing someone. But the idea that the Israelis might want or need British help is vanity: they have around twice the number of planes we do.
Philp went in first on grooming, telling the House that he’d met survivors the previous day. Natalie Fleet, the Labour MP for Bolsover, shouted that he’d never met any of them when he’d been in the Home Office. But to be fair to Philp, Elon Musk hadn’t tweeted about it in those days.
Rayner thanked Philp “for his tone, and for putting the survivors and victims at the heart of his question.” It was “absolutely right” to have an inquiry, she said, which was very much not the position last week. Though there was just a hint of a warning in her reply that the government would implement the results of a previous inquiry, “which he will have known about, as the minister in charge at the time”.
Philp’s second question had a less friendly tone, complaining that Starmer had accused him and Badenoch of jumping on a “far-right bandwagon” when they called for a grooming inquiry. This was very unfair, because both of them had always passionately believed this, but out of respect for the victims they kept silent until six months after they left government.
He turned to small boat crossings, which continue to rise. This has been “the worst year in history for illegal immigrants crossing the Channel!” he declared. Though if it’s any comfort to Labour ministers, 2026 will probably be worse. This, Philp said, was all the result of the scrapping of the last government’s policy of paying Rwanda scheme.
Rayner was having none of this: the Tories had made their deal with Rwanda in 2022, she declared, and arrivals had continued to soar. Philp was furious. “The Rwanda scheme never started!” he protested. True Rwanda had never been tried!
No one said it, but the reality is that Rwanda continues to contribute to the refugee crisis, sponsoring a civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I think this is what economists would call a supply-side measure.
Rayner relied on the Labour catch-all answer. “The Conservatives had 14 years of failure,” she snapped. “I will take no lectures from the Johnny-come-lately who could not do anything when he was in office.”
This is the problem facing any Tory spokesman: most of the problems they point to are ones they conspicuously failed to fix. While Philp tries to style it out, Gareth Bacon, the shadow transport secretary, showed an alternative approach. He was replying to Heidi Alexander, who had set out a “litany of failure” the attempts to build a high-speed train line to Manchester, or Birmingham, or at least to North London. Hers was a damning list of cost overruns and delays.
But Bacon, far from arguing, agreed with every word. He had decided to plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court. It was certainly a change from the approach of his leader, who would probably have been more inclined to simply claim that she had personally completed HS2 three years ago.
“As a country,” Bacon observed, “we must learn from those mistakes and we must not repeat them.” I’m pretty sure that’s not the Conservative position. Their plea to the nation at the next election as that it will repeat at least one of the mistakes of the last decade.
