Kemi Badenoch was on savage form at Prime Minister’s Questions. The leader of the opposition has generally improved her performance in this session, but she has always been particularly good at verbally kicking politicians when they are down. Today, she came out with some brutal lines, including that Labour MPs were saying they were being called ‘the paedo defenders party’ and that Starmer had ‘411 MPs and not a single one of them has any imagination’. Starmer by contrast was still waffling on about ‘the party of Liz Truss’ and complaining that she was ‘carping from the sidelines’.
Badenoch was vicious when Starmer tried his regular joke about Conservatives defecting to Reform
Badenoch’s tail was up this lunchtime because she felt she had been leading the debate on student loans. Describing them as a ‘debt trap’, she said ‘it is time for all of us to do something about it’ and asked whether the Prime Minister would cut the interest on the loans.
Starmer responded that he was ‘glad to hear that the leader of the opposition has finally admitted that they scammed the country on this, and that applies to everything they did in government’. He added that this government had ‘inherited their broken student loans system’ and would ‘look at other ways to make it fairer’. He then trumpeted this morning’s news on falling energy bills and took credit for that, saying: ‘we promised to cut the cost of living, we are cutting the cost of living.’
Badenoch replied that energy bills were still higher than when Labour came into office. She then pointed out that her party was under new leadership, and that many Labour MPs wished that theirs was too. She didn’t say this, but those Labour MPs also feel that the continued reliance of the Prime Minister on blaming the last Tory government is no longer washing with the public, who feel Starmer should have made more headway and showed far more authority by now.
Badenoch was also pretty vicious when Starmer tried his regular joke about Conservatives defecting to Reform: she told him that his party was smaller now too, and that in one case this was because a Labour MP had been arrested on suspicion of child sex offences. No wonder, she told him, to audible gasps, some Labour MPs have been reporting being called ‘the paedo defenders party’. She was, she added, only repeating what Labour MPs had said, something that has been picked up in vox pops carried out by broadcasters in Gorton and Denton.
She returned to student loans again, accusing the government of taking from students to give to ‘Benefits Street’. In her next question, she claimed that Starmer was only talking about the loans because she had raised them, that she wanted to ditch Tory policies that didn’t work, whereas the Prime Minister wanted to copy them.
Starmer continued to complain that she wasn’t welcoming falling energy bills and inflation, and that she should be apologising for her party’s record in office.
In the final of the six questions from Badenoch, she called Starmer’s government ‘useless’, and said the Prime Minister could not take decisions. Starmer accused her in return of carping from the sidelines, something multiple Conservative prime ministers threw at him across the Commons when he was Leader of the Opposition too. He was even copying old Tory jibes.
The Tory leader by contrast was colourful, tabloid, and an example of how much better Badenoch has become at getting attention and putting Starmer under pressure, even if her own party doesn’t yet benefit from that.
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