It is getting rather repetitive writing that Kemi Badenoch had an uncomfortable Prime Minister’s Questions, so how about this: today’s PMQs showed that Keir Starmer does not regard the Conservative leader as any kind of political threat. He openly ridiculed her in his answers – perhaps too openly to appear statesmanlike.
The question that invited that ridicule followed a fairly benign one on ensuring that Ukraine be at the negotiating table in talks on the country’s future. Badenoch told the Commons she would then turn to the details of the defence spending announcement, saying:
Over the weekend, I suggested to the Prime Minister that he cut the aid budget, and I am pleased that he accepted my advice. It’s the fastest response I’ve ever had from the Prime Minister. However, he announced £13.4b billion in additional defence spending yesterday. This morning his defence secretary said the uplift is only £6 billion. Which is the correct figure?
Starmer rose:
I’m going to have to let the Leader of the Opposition down gently. She didn’t feature in my thinking at all. I was so busy at the weekend that I didn’t even see her proposal. She’s appointed herself, I think, the saviour of the western civilisation. It’s a desperate search for relevance. If you take the numbers for this financial year and then the financial year 27-28, that’s a £13.4 billion increase. That is the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the cold war.
Badenoch came back, complaining that Starmer wasn’t being clear, which was an odd verdict on an unusually clear answer. She then said that the Institute for Fiscal Studies had said the government was playing ‘silly games with numbers’ and asked him for the difference. Starmer continued to ridicule her:
We went through this two weeks ago in going through the same question over and over again, so let me say this again. If you take the financial year and then you take the financial year for 27-28, the difference between the two is £13.4 billion. That’s the same answer. If you ask again I’ll give the same answer again.
Badenoch was not happy. ‘Mr Speaker, someone needs to tell the Prime Minister that being patronising is not a substitute for answering questions. He hasn’t answered.’
Starmer told the chamber she was asking the same question again, and gave the same answer, then said the second part of her question was ‘serious’, which was about Ukraine. He added that there needed to be ‘security guarantees’ for Ukraine and that ‘we are working on that’ but was not in a position to put details before the House ‘as she well knows today’.
The Tory leader then said the Conservatives wanted to support the raise in spending, but needed the detail. She asked whether the additional spend would include the Chagos deal. Here, Starmer really could have given a very clear answer, but instead he offered a long lawyerly response where he explained ‘the funding I announced yesterday is for our capability to put ourselves in a position to rise to the generational challenge’ – but he didn’t say no.
Badenoch complained that the government plan for raising defence spending was ‘too slow’, and asked the Chagos question. Starmer said he had ‘just dealt with that’, and then offered his long lawyerly answer. He added, rather Trumpishly, that Badenoch ‘gave what people described as a rambling speech yesterday’ – making clear that he hadn’t bothered to pay it any attention himself.
But other Tory MPs had been paying attention to Starmer’s own rambling answers, and later in the session Kieran Mullan asked him to explicitly rule out using money from the defence budget for the Chagos Islands deal. Starmer did not do that, offering the same formulation of words about what the money was for, while not saying what it was not for. Meanwhile former chancellor Jeremy Hunt wanted a timetable for raising defence spending so Starmer could ‘look the president in the eye and say that Europe is finally pulling its weight on defence’. Starmer agreed about the importance of Nato, but didn’t give Hunt a timetable. Badenoch was right about the need for more detail on defence: it’s just that she failed to ask the right questions to expose that.
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