Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Boris Johnson’s final PMQs was a let down

Boris Johnson says goodbye (Credit: Parliament TV)

Boris Johnson’s farewell Prime Minister’s Questions was rather like his premiership: full of the unexpected, rather chaotic and a bit of a let down. Westminster has already visibly moved on from Johnson, even though he remains in office until early September, and so Keir Starmer devoted his questions to asking Johnson about the candidates to be his successor.

Johnson claimed that he wasn’t following the contest particularly closely, but that any one of the candidates would, ‘like some household detergent, wipe the floor with him’. Starmer, however, was enjoying the many insults that have been thrown between the camps in this race to be leader, and quoted a number of them back at the Prime Minister. His theme was that no-one in the party was now proud of what it stood for or what it had done in government: 

Tory MPs rose into a standing ovation for the man they were calling on to quit from the same benches two weeks ago

‘They’ve trashed every part of their record in government, from dental care to ambulance waiting times to the highest taxes in 70 years. What message does it send when the candidates to be prime minister can’t find a single decent thing to say about him, about each other, or about their record in government?’

Starmer used each question to deal with a different candidate. He asked whether Johnson agreed with Rishi Sunak that the plans of his opponents were ‘fantasy economics’; or whether Liz Truss was right that Sunak had no plan for growth. Then he pointed out that Penny Mordaunt had said ‘our public services are in a desperate state, we can’t continue with what we’ve been doing because it clearly isn’t working’, and asked: ‘Who’s been running our public services for the last 12 years?’ 

He also quoted Kemi Badenoch’s claim that she had warned Sunak that the covid loan scheme was at risk of fraudulent activity, and that he had ignored her.

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Isabel Hardman
Written by
Isabel Hardman
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

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