Starmer doesn’t have a handle on his job as Prime Minister

Keir Starmer had an appalling performance at Prime Minister’s Questions today. It was summarised very well later in the session by Conservative MP Andrew Snowden, who told the chamber:

Every week the Prime Minister comes here and reads out this pre-scripted nonsense that bears no resemblance to the questions he’s actually asked. The leader of the opposition asked him about Peter Mandelson and he answered about the war in Iran. The leader of the opposition asked him about Peter Mandelson again, and he answered with an attack on the shadow justice secretary. He was asked about Mandelson again and talked about protests in London. What is he scared of? What is he hiding?

Starmer had indeed spent his exchanges with Kemi Badenoch largely lashing out at the Tory leader rather than answering her repeated questions about Mandelson. She had rightly decided to just keep pushing with the same question until the Prime Minister’s answers became increasingly ludicrous and irrelevant. 

Her first question was whether Starmer had spoken to Mandelson before appointing him as ambassador. It had been reported that he had not done so by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund in the latest edition of their book on the Prime Minister, Get In. Despite Downing Street having already had to confirm this on the record, Starmer chose not to answer the question, saying he had already apologised for the appointment and that the process was flawed.

When Badenoch asked a second time, he said his judgement on the matter was wrong. He did the political equivalent of trying to distract the chamber by pointing at a massive squirrel in the distance, and brought up the Tory position on the war in Iran.

Things deteriorated from there: Badenoch kept asking about Mandelson and Starmer kept talking about anything and everything else he could think of. He quickly alighted on Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, and criticised his comments about ‘mass ritual prayer in public places’. In fact, he stuck to Timothy for the next three answers, too, as well as returning to Badenoch’s changing position on Iran.

It is almost as though he feels the only thing Starmer has left to do as prime minister is tell the woman who wants his job how to do it. Those lectures are always tedious and pompous. But today they also underlined that Starmer really doesn’t have the handle on his job that he thinks he does.