It was Prime Minister’s Questions, and Keir Starmer faced another inquisition at the hands of the Tory who knows how to put him on the spot. That’s right, Lincoln Jopp, the hero of Sierra Leone, fictional husband of Kristin Scott-Thomas and After Eight heir had a question down. And Kemi Badenoch was going to have a crack as well.
Reform’s latest arrival Sarah Pochin was down to ask a question as well. This is a scary moment for a new MP: as the session began, we could see her leg shaking. Though that might just be the effect of being sandwiched between Richard Tice and Lee Anderson.
It is a tricky moment for the government, which has spent nearly a year saying there is no money left, but has learned that this is not something its MPs wish to hear. Rachel Reeves was touring the north of England explaining that actually there was money after all, which prompted the question of why she’d put them all through so much torment. Expect more of this at next week’s spending review. Even those of us who follow politics fairly closely would struggle to tell you what this government is actually for.
Jeremy Corbyn entered at one of the doors high up on the side of the chamber. He was clutching a bundle of red cloth, which he jammed into the shelf in front of him when he sat. Was it a banner? Was he planning a dramatic protest?
There was certainly protest in the air. Outside there was a demonstration about Gaza, and inside several MPs were wearing large red badges urging the government to take a firmer line with Israel. There was a rumour that some of them were going to stage a walkout in sympathy. It is an article of absolute faith on the British left that His Majesty’s Government could stop what is happening in Gaza if it wanted to. An interesting point of agreement between Corbyn and the most reactionary right-winger is the belief that Britain is the main character in every international drama.
Badenoch picked up where she’d left off two weeks ago, on Winter Fuel Payments. She had a decent joke — that Reeves “is rushing her plans because she just realised when winter is” —and she followed up with a simple question: “How many of the 10 million people who lost their winter fuel payments will get it back?”
It’s not clear if anyone knows the answer to this yet, and if Starmer does he’s keeping it to himself. Instead he welcomed Badenoch “catching up with what happened two weeks ago”.
No one rises to bait with as much enthusiasm as Badenoch, and she did so immediately. “The prime minister clearly has selective amnesia,” she snapped. “I asked him three questions about the winter fuel payment two weeks ago and he was floundering.” Well, recollections may vary, but as Ronald Reagan famously said, if you’re explaining that you actually won PMQs a fortnight ago, you’re stuffed.
The rest of the exchange continued in this vein. Badenoch has a reasonable critique of the government — “chaos, chaos, chaos” — but it was lost in long questions that bounced from Chagos to steel tariffs to welfare. Starmer, with the home field advantage of a much larger crowd of MPs behind him, never looked troubled. A no-score draw is, at this stage, effectively a win for him.
Pochin’s question turned out to be a call for Britain to ban the burka, which Starmer simply ignored. As for Jopp, his early triumphs may have gone to his head. He urged Starmer to remind Reeves that “the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”. This delighted his own benches, who chanted along with him, but also Labour MPs, once they remembered that Jopp took over his seat from Kwasi Kwarteng.
As for the Gaza protest, it’s unclear whether it happened. Six MPs wearing badges did leave the chamber at once, but it might just have been an effort to jump the lunch queue. A few minutes after that, Corbyn himself departed, leaving his cloth bundle behind. While cowards flinched and traitors sneered, he’d left his red flag lying there. Fifteen minutes later an attendant removed it. Perhaps it was just his laundry.
He would return a couple of hours later, to give a speech demanding a public inquiry into British complicity in Gaza, though he was so forthright on all the details that it wasn’t clear what was left for an inquiry to probe. The government was planning to ignore this call, but Corbyn’s allies had a cunning plan to force a vote on the issue by shouting both Aye and No when deputy speaker Nusrat Ghani asked the chamber’s opinion. They did this twice, until Ghani, rolling her eyes, reminded them that they aren’t allowed to shout No unless they actually plan to vote No. Nevertheless, Corbyn’s supporters were delighted, applauding him in his triumph, whatever it was. Like Badenoch, he is sure he is winning the argument.
Whoever runs to the teacher has lost
Although some on the Conservative side feel their leader needs help. At the end of PMQs, Jesse Norman rose to complain that the whole match had been unfair. In a point of order, he complained that Starmer hadn’t meekly offered the Conservative leader his neck to stand upon. The prime minister had been asked a question, Norman said, and “he entirely changed the subject!”
You could admire the chutzpah — I do not recall Norman complaining in a similar fashion when Boris Johnson gave exactly the same answers each week whatever the questions were — but as a tactic it was doomed. Parliament is run by the rule of the playground, and whoever runs to the teacher has lost.
