At today’s Prime Ministers’ Questions there was only one subject anyone was discussing. The Defence Investment Plan is supposed to be Keir Starmer’s big legacy so there is no surprise that is deeply suspect and lacking in fiscal credibility. Kemi Badenoch chose to ask all of her six questions on the subject. She began by asking about the gulf between the £15bn promised and the £28bn which John Healey wanted to then effortlessly narrowing her focus to whether Andy Burnham was signed up to a plan with a £4.7bn black hole in it. ‘Any Labour Prime Minister would stand behind this plan’, insisted Starmer. ‘Cheers Keir’, his predecessor must be thinking.
It was not just Badenoch asking about defence. The Lib Dems and even the SNP both queued up too trying to have a go. To be fair to Starmer, he had retorts at the ready, pointing out to Ed Davey that ‘he sat in a cabinet which cut defence to two per cent’ while his answer to Dave Doogan was a corker. Pointing out that the nationalists are committed to renouncing the nuclear deterrent, he ridiculed the party for its recent legal woes. ‘Their chief executive has just been jailed’, he scoffed. ‘So let’s have no more advice and sanctimonious nonsense from the SNP’. Even Tory MPs nodded to that.
The DIP is supposed to be Keir Starmer’s big legacy so there is no surprise that is deeply suspect and lacking in fiscal credibility
Some minor characters tried to make the most of their few moments on the stage. Lee Anderson asked a punchy question about illegal migrants replacing nurses in a house of multiple occupancy in his constituency, one of whom went on to commit a rape. Starmer made a cursory reference to falling migration before wheeling out the usual lines on Nigel Farage’s donors. Al Pinkerton, the king of the Surrey gilet, asked Starmer about a local hospital before the Prime Minister pointed out that he had opposed it on the grounds it would impact the local golf course. ‘I can’t think of anything more Lib Dem, he joked, to laughter across the House. ‘Hole in one’ muttered one heckler.
Yet it was overall a pretty lacklustre session. There were plenty of gaps on the Labour benches; a sense of nostalgia to Starmer’s usual lines on the Tory track record. The number of references to the ‘Right Honourable Member for Makerfield’ reflected the reality that already minds across the House are switching from Starmer to Burnham. Authority forgets a dying king – and the transfer of power is nearly complete.
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