One of the great gifts in politics is the capacity to surprise. Kemi Badenoch, again, demonstrated her ability in this respect when she chose to wrong-foot Keir Starmer at the last PMQs before recess. All of Westminster is talking about Morgan McSweeney’s missing phone, which has taken on the status of Chekhov’s gun in the minds of some. But having led on Peter Mandelson at last week’s exchange, Badenoch chose to switch it up today. Energy proved to be the Tory leader’s line of questioning, hammering Starmer on the government’s refusal to grant new drilling licences for Jackdaw and Rosebank. With oil prices in the headlines and the Holyrood elections looming, it was an opportunity to put some clear blue water between the Tories and Labour on an issue affecting voters’ pockets.
Starmer had his attack lines prepared but it took him half the session to get into them. The Prime Minister could not help himself but explain, in his usual patronising fashion, to Badenoch the proper process by which new licences are granted. It was the secretary of state, he insisted, not the prime minister, who was responsible: only the Energy Secretary, under the existing law, ought to preside over this procedure. It was Starmer at his most lawyerly, putting procedure over politics and placing detail over the big picture. It teed Badenoch nicely up to explode in her third question. ‘He is the prime minister!’ she insisted, mocking Starmer’s ‘hiding behind procedure’ in front of the whole House. It plays nicely to the current lines of Tory attack that Ed Miliband is, in effect, the real prime minister, given reports about his effective veto at the National Security Council.
Plodding and peevish, Starmer failed to realise that the intricacies of 2010 to 2024 energy policy might be lost on the audience at home. He even allowed himself to be pictured with his head in his hands, in mock exasperation at Badenoch’s questions. This will be the image of today’s session. In the second half of PMQs, Starmer staged something of a comeback, pivoting Badenoch’s questions away from jobs to the question of Iran. ‘I stuck to my principles not to join the war’, he told the House. ‘She wanted to jump into the war without regard for the consequences.’ He referenced Badenoch’s somewhat unconvincing claim that the conflict was a ‘difficult one’ last weekend, suggesting that the Tory leader would have left the UK ‘stranded without a thought-through position’. It was a semi-decent recovery, but Badenoch moved on to new territory, hammering home boilerplate rhetoric on Labour as the party of ‘benefits street’, to which Starmer mustered only a limited comeback.
The rest of the session passed largely without incident. Nigel Farage asked a question on small boats before departing the chamber, prompting Starmer an easy open goal about Reform abandoning its constituents, and Tory backbencher Peter Fortune had a nice Easter line, suggesting that ‘the Prime Minister’s thoughts are turning to the miracle of resurrection’. Ed Davey, meanwhile, in his never-ending quest for relevance, tried to insert himself into the Badenoch-Starmer exchange. As an ex-energy secretary who himself granted drilling licences, he said he was in a position to ‘make a judgement on this’, before proudly declaring that ‘the Prime Minister is exactly right.’ Expect that one to duly appear in Tory attack ads. Overall, a good session for Badenoch, whose focus on energy was mirrored in her confident and enthused delivery.
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