‘He has got no choice but to be here for Prime Minister’s Questions! That’s why he’s here. If he could skip this, he would!’ That accusation from Kemi Badenoch would apply to any week, but it was striking that at this first session of the New Year, Keir Starmer looked like he wanted to skip a session dominated by his comfort zone of international diplomacy. The Prime Minister did not have a good session, and had Badenoch continued to be strong throughout her six questions, then his delicately worded statements about Donald Trump might have started to disintegrate as well.
Nigel Farage chose to listen to PMQs on the radio
Badenoch started by complaining that given the ‘last few days have seen significant international events’, it was ‘frankly astonishing that the Prime Minister is not making a full statement to Parliament today’. She accused him of showing a ‘fundamental lack of respect’ for parliament, something Starmer himself would have glibly claimed about the Tories when they were in power and he was on the opposition benches.
The Prime Minister did tell the Chamber that there ‘will be a statement to the House at the earliest opportunity’ – an assertion MPs rightly jeered. He added that when it came to any deployment of troops in Ukraine, ‘I would put that matter to this House for a debate beforehand and for a vote on that deployment. That is consistent with recent practice and I will adhere to that.’
Badenoch asked entirely reasonably why he couldn’t do that statement. The Speaker interrupted to say that he too had requested a statement at the earliest opportunity. The Tory leader then asked whether the Prime Minister would call for an urgent meeting of European leaders to discuss Greenland. Starmer rather petulantly complained about the question, saying: ‘She says she wants to hear about Ukraine. She’s got six questions, she’s not even asking a second question about what we did yesterday.’
Once again, Lindsay Hoyle interrupted, assuring the Prime Minister he didn’t need to worry about the questions being asked. Starmer asserted he had ‘done everything within my ability to strengthen Nato’. He complained that Badenoch would have rather he come to PMQs than attend last year’s Nato summit. Badenoch then pointed out that ‘he has still not had a call with president Trump’, something she could have drilled into in subsequent questions to suggest that Starmer was not in fact gaining influence as a result of his diplomatic tightrope over Trump’s recent actions.
Unfortunately the questions then descended into a bit of a race to the bottom over which party had spent less on the armed forces and who had the worst Attorney General. Starmer quoted former Tory defence secretary Ben Wallace saying his party had ‘hollowed out’ the armed forces when in government. He also pointed out that the Tory shadow attorney general Lord Wolfson was advising Roman Abramovich. Normally, Starmer is very protective over a lawyer’s freedom to advise clients they don’t agree with, so it was an unusual attack, and one that also allowed Badenoch to have a pop at his Attorney General Richard Hermer. These fights about who is slightly worse out of the two main parties benefit neither side. The one man who does gain from this kind of politics wasn’t even in the Chamber: Nigel Farage had chosen to listen to PMQs on the radio instead.
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