Kemi Badenoch’s good form at Prime Minister’s Questions continues. The Tory leader visibly enjoyed herself again today as she feasted on Labour’s misfortune, and she did a good job in covering the breadth of problems in the government. She used her six questions to ask about different departments and how they were faring: an approach that can often risk diluting the overall attack. But today, Badenoch had an overarching theme to those questions, which was that the Prime Minister and his colleagues are failing to meet their own promises. The way she illustrated that argument was very effective.
Badenoch opened by quoting Labour MPs criticising Starmer, something that is becoming easier to do by the week. She asked: ‘Why are his own MPs describing him as a caretaker Prime Minister?’ Starmer replied that he and his MPs were proud to have passed the Budget, and while Labour is concentrating on the cost of living and energy bills, ‘she is just trying to save her job’. It felt like an outdated defence, when it is currently his job that is insecure and Badenoch is enjoying something of a resurgence.
The Tory leader then joked that the Cabinet are ‘all so busy trying to replace him’ that they weren’t focusing on their jobs. Starting with energy, she claimed that ‘the Energy Secretary wants to recycle himself as leader.’ Pointing out that Labour had promised to cut energy bills by £300, she asked the Prime Minister how much they had fallen since the election. Starmer replied: ‘I’m very pleased to say we are taking £150 off energy bills. I can also tell her that that’s on top of the £150 we have taken off last year for the three million poorest families, now for six million poorest families.’ He then changed the subject to ex-Tory MPs leaving the party for Reform, and asked who was next. ‘We can all see the shadow justice secretary twitching after his come and get me plea from the member for Clacton. We need no lessons from them.’
Badenoch responded rather joyfully that ‘I asked him about energy bills, you could power the National Grid on all of that hot air’. She then told the Commons that energy bills had risen by £187. She then moved onto ‘someone else who is making a mess’. ‘Let’s look at the Education Secretary,’ she said. ‘Ah there she is!’ She asked Starmer how many more teachers Labour had recruited, having pledged an increase of 6,500. The Prime Minister replied: ‘More than when they left office! And I’m very pleased to say so, on an upward trajectory.’
Badenoch then had her most enjoyable moment of the session, which was shouting ‘wrong!’ in a comical fashion at the Prime Minister. ‘There are now 400 fewer teachers since she came into office. She’s shaking her head: it’s on the DfE website. Does she not check it once in a while? I can understand that the right hon lady is angry: we are all angry at the mess she is making.’ She then asked Starmer if he knows ‘anything about what’s going on in the Home Office?’ How was the government doing on its pledge to recruit 13,000 more police officers?
Starmer replied that that were ‘3,000 more before the end of March, and we’re rising on police numbers.’ He complained that the criminal justice system was ‘utterly broken’ and that the Tories had lost control of every department. He then made his obligatory reference to Liz Truss, joking that Badenoch might be the guest star on the former PM’s new show.
Up popped Badenoch
Up popped Badenoch to reply that Starmer was ‘wrong again!’ and that there were 1,300 fewer than at the election. She mentioned the reporting that Tony Blair was having conversations with Shabana Mahmood, ‘because he’s already given up on the Prime Minister’. She then asked about Wes Streeting and how many NHS appointments had been lost to strike action. This gave Starmer the chance to parade Labour’s achievement of five million extra appointments, over the (cynically easy) initial target of two million. Badenoch returned that 93,000 appointments had been lost to strike action. ‘It’s the truth! I know they wouldn’t know the truth if it punched them in the face, but I’m telling them the truth.’ She added that ‘the Prime Minister congratulates himself on five million extra appointments [Labour MPs cheered lustily at this point, and this point only], in our last year of office we delivered 6.5 million extra appointments. Under Labour everything is getting worse. Jobs, bills, police numbers, teacher numbers. Everything is getting worse. The Cabinet should be doing their own jobs. What are they doing? They are trying to compete for the caretaker’s job. The only person who doesn’t want the prime minister’s job is the chancellor. She’s just trying to cling on to her own.’
Starmer shot back that Badenoch was ‘living proof that you can say whatever you like when no one is listening’. He does have a point about the difference between a Tory party whose leader is doing better at PMQs and one that’s getting a hearing from the public. What any members of the public will also have heard from that session was two apparently conflicting sets of numbers from each side on how many police officers, teachers and NHS appointments there were. While Badenoch was able to suggest that Starmer is not meeting his promises, the problem with these kinds of PMQs is that they become a fog of apparently meaningless numbers. What matters more is how voters feel about whether the country is going in the right direction, and the answer to that is clear too. They do not, though, think it would be doing any better under the Tories, which is why Badenoch still has a Herculean task ahead of her, even if she has managed to improve at PMQs.
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