Kemi Badenoch had an annoyingly good Prime Minister’s Questions today: annoying for her, because no one will remember it. The scrap between the party leaders before the Budget is always overshadowed by the fiscal event that follows immediately afterwards, but the Tory leader made good use of it anyway. She focused all her questions on Andy Burnham’s confusion over Britain’s relationship with the European Union.
Badenoch opened by asking whether the Prime Minister wanted a referendum on rejoining the EU, to which Burnham replied that the ‘red lines’ in his party’s 2024 manifesto would remain. (Those red lines are ‘we will be confident in our status outside of the EU, but a leading nation in Europe once again, with an improved and ambitious relationship with our European partners.’) This, the Conservative leader suggested to the chamber, made it sound ‘like he doesn’t know if he wants another EU referendum’. ‘I don’t, she added, accusing him of having ‘popped up on telly and opened his mouth without engaging his brain’.
Burnham continued to insist throughout his answers that he is using the upcoming EU summit as ‘an opportunity to improve the poor deal which they negotiated’, but Badenoch felt this left enough room to keep accusing him of swithering over whether he did or didn’t want another referendum. She quoted a by-election candidate (Burnham) who had said that ‘the last thing we should do right now is re-run those arguments’, adding: ‘Does the Prime Minister still agree with himself?’
The Prime Minister started quoting Badenoch’s words back at her, reminding her that she had claimed it was a mistake to leave the EU without a plan for growth. He added that she should have said it was a mistake to leave without a plan for immigration, which led to the ‘Boriswave’.
This was the point in the session where Burnham started trying to deal with Badenoch’s questions by asking his own questions back. He pointed her to another incident where she had been asked by LBC whether Brexit was good for London and had refused to answer. Badenoch continued to accuse Burnham of not knowing ‘whether he agrees with himself or not’, and then: ‘He is the Prime Minister, not me. He wants to ask me questions – I am very happy to swap places with him.’ Tory MPs cheered at that.
The Conservative leader also rather boldly reminded the chamber of the Brexit deadlock in the 2017 parliament, saying: ‘We do not want to go through that again. The country was paralysed. It was miserable… It was because that side of the House would not respect the result and they are doing it again.’ She kept asking him to clarify his stance, ‘instead of leaving it to his team again’.
Burnham’s riposte was that his plan was backed by business, and asked her to back it too, in order to ‘send a strong message that Britain is calling for a better Brexit deal’. He had, though, left enough room for Badenoch to drive home her message once again that this Prime Minister doesn’t always say what he means – or that he quite often doesn’t know what he means, either.
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