Handbags at noon! It’s always nice to watch Sir Keir Starmer descend into the sort of incandescent fury that living under his government induces from most people on a daily basis. The absolute standout moment of today’s PMQs was one not caught by the cameras but a behind-the-scenes bit of piggy rage from the PM. Sir Keir Starmer’s anger when Lindsay Hoyle told him that it wasn’t ‘leader of the opposition’s questions’ was visible. But it was after the session, when a puce-coloured Starmer had an argument with Hoyle that the real joy was to be had, culminating in his flouncing out of the chamber. As he did so, he shot the Speaker an absolutely filthy look. Get her!
All this had, in fairness, been prompted by Kemi Badenoch. If the obliteration of the Conservative party is inevitable at the next election, it will be a shame to lose the one person who seems best at goading Sir Keir into his hissy fits. Perhaps the goings-on in the House of Commons don’t really matter but I suspect that nobody – not even Uncle Nigel – will be capable of poking Sir Keir with quite the same matador-style panache as Mrs Badenoch. Today she simply quoted things at him – starting with the accusation by ex-Nato chief Lord Robertson that the Prime Minister had a ‘corrosive complacency’ when it came to defence.
I suspect that nobody will be capable of poking Sir Keir with the same matador-style panache as Mrs Badenoch
Sir Keir inevitably gave an answer which involved a labyrinthine tour of every Tory defence cut of the last decade and a half. To be fair to him – and when are we ever not in this column? – the Conservative record is apocalyptically bad. However, the PM shot himself in the foot by claiming that he, unlike them, was overseeing huge increases in defence spending. As Mrs Badenoch told him, to his visible ire, talking about an increase is not the same as giving an increase.
It was in response to this – which Sir Keir fashioned into a long tirade about Iran – that Sir Lindsay finally snapped and reminded him that it was Prime Minister’s questions and not opposition questions. Sir Keir sat down, bristling with anger, crossing and uncrossing his legs by way of distraction, not unlike Kenny Everett’s Cupid Stunt. Next to him, Douglas Alexander looked like a deflated bagpipe and Shabana Mahmood tried not to look like she was enjoying every minute of his humiliation. Pat McFadden sat there, looking as if what little was left of his soul had just departed his body.
Sir Keir continued his clucking and ranting, but to less and less enthusiasm from his own benches. There were generally mournful faces among backbench Labour MPs. Labour’s matinee idol Henry Tufnell looked haunted, like a middle-aged Vincent Price. Even John Slinger, whose presence in the chamber is normally akin to a cymbal-clashing monkey, wasn’t nodding along as much as usual. ‘This is so poor from the Prime Minister’ said Mrs Badenoch, with the air of a disappointed deputy headmistress.
Elsewhere in the chamber things were as predictable as you’d expect. With the upper-middle classes of the Home Counties descending on the Continent for their holidays over the next few months, Sir Ed Davey asked about the pressing issue for his core ‘worried well’ constituency – would Sir Keir do something about malfunctioning e-gates?
A barely functioning backbench MP screamed a non-question about how great her local hospital was doing under Labour. The surgeon and assisted suicide supporter Peter Prinsley asked an anti-Reform-coded question about how much insurance-related health options might put patients at risk (very little, if outcomes from France and Germany are anything to go by). All a bit rich from a man whose primary aim for NHS users seems to be to euthanise them. Once again, the House of Commons acted as if it were some great podium for the needs of the people of Britain, when in fact it’s more like a low-budget Versailles c.1789.
Still, in such situations one has to take what joy one can. Sir Keir turning the colour of Barney the Dinosaur as he confronted Sir Lindsay will live long in the memory.
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