Kemi Badenoch had plenty to work with at Prime Minister’s Questions today. She opened with the departure of the head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, as it allowed her to suggest that Starmer was dodging taking responsibility himself. She asked: ‘Does the prime minister believe that when an organisation descends into total shambles, the person at the top should resign?’
Starmer replied that he was ‘very proud to lead this party at the budget last week’, listing the positive announcements on the NHS, energy bills and so on, before adding: ‘We’re fixing the mess that they left, and I’m very proud to be doing so’.
Badenoch then made her regular accusation that Starmer didn’t want to answer her question, something she presumably copied from the Prime Minister’s stint as leader of the opposition when he accused her predecessors of dodging questions too. She claimed that Starmer ‘doesn’t want to answer a question about taking responsibility because he likes to blame everyone else except himself and so does the Chancellor’. Badenoch added that the truth was that Richard Hughes had been ‘forced out’ as the head of the OBR for telling the ‘truth’ that Reeves didn’t need to raise taxes. If Reeves had been a CEO, ‘she would have been fired, and she might even have been prosecuted for market abuse’. Reeves pulled a face of ridiculous exasperation at this point, while Badenoch demanded that the Chancellor fully co-operate with any investigation into what happened.
Like Reeves, Starmer chose to ridicule Badenoch rather than engage with her very bold claim about market abuse. ‘She’s completely losing the plot!’ he replied. He then took care to look and point at Reeves as he praised her performance as Chancellor. Reeves took care to beam.
The Chancellor might have looked happy, but other ministers are not, and Badenoch picked up on that in her next question as she read to Starmer some of their quotes to journalists about the Budget being ‘a disaster from start to finish’. ‘Who said that?’ she asked theatrically, pointing in turn at Labour frontbenchers and asking: ‘Was it him? Was it her?’ Once again, Badenoch looked like she was really enjoying herself. ‘It was probably her, actually, it was probably the Chancellor! One of his ministers said the Prime Minister and Chancellor look weak and incompetent. The country agrees.’ She finished this long question by asking why, if the head the OBR had been forced to resign, the Chancellor was still in her job.
Starmer has a particular way of saying ‘Mr Speaker!’ very vehemently when he is trying to show exasperation. It stands in for ‘oh my god!’ and presumably Lindsay Hoyle quite enjoys the comparison. Today’s appeal to the heavens preceded a list of things the government was doing well, and then: ‘What she doesn’t understand is that picking up a £16bn tab for their failure is not a good starting point for any Budget.’ He then said the OBR had said yesterday that the Chancellor’s speech [where she had warned that the state of the economy could mean tax rises in the Budget] ‘was not misleading’, so Badenoch should ‘get up and apologise’.
Badenoch got up giggling. ‘No one believes a word the Prime Minister says! We now know, the black hole was fake, her book was fake, her CV was fake… Even her chess claims are made up! She doesn’t belong in the Treasury, she belongs in la-la-land.’ She said the Budget had included benefit rises to protect Starmer and Reeves from their backbenchers, and asked Starmer how it ‘suddenly became affordable at the very time he needed to save his own skin’ to remove the two-child benefit cap.
Steamer argued that the benefit cap had dragged hundreds of thousands of children into poverty. To cheers from behind him, he said he was proud that Labour was lifting half a million children out of poverty, and that the Tories were ‘the party of child poverty’. Badenoch not unreasonably responded that if all this was true, why did he remove the whip from MPs who voted against the government and in favour of removing the cap last year.
This just gave Starmer another chance to rally his own MPs as he said that ‘bringing down child poverty is a moral mission, a political mission and a personal mission’. He demanded that Badenoch apologise for the Tories’ record on child poverty. She did not, arguing instead that ‘making the whole country poorer and destroying jobs is not how you keep children out of poverty’.
It was going quite well for Badenoch, though she did then stumble on her words as she listed all the things Labour had broken, managing to say they’d ended up with a ‘broken bed’. She had meant to say ‘a broken budget for Benefits Street’. She then picked up on the Education Secretary ‘chuntering’, and asked where the budget for special educational needs was coming from. This one line would make a good subject for another PMQs, given the confusion over this funding pot. Badenoch paid off with the line: ‘Isn’t the truth Mr Speaker that behind it all is a Prime Minister who only cares about one person’s job: his own!’
Starmer’s final reply wasn’t bad
Starmer’s final reply wasn’t bad. ‘She wants to put hard a million children back into poverty. She thinks the Chancellor should resign because the economy is improving. We are turning the page on their failure. We are bringing waiting lists down. We are bringing stability that cuts inflation and interest rates and we are bringing down bills. We are building a brighter future.’
The other notable questions in the session came from Graham Stringer, who was worried about the new definition of Islamophobia bringing back blasphemy laws, something Starmer said he was happy to give him an assurance that it wouldn’t. Then Conservative George Freeman raised a deepfake video that suggested he was joining Reform. He wanted Starmer to address the problem of deepfakes, but the Prime Minister also took the opportunity to brand any possible pact between Reform and the Conservatives as an ‘unholy alliance of austerity and failure’. It will at least mean the Tories get mentioned a bit more often by Labour than they do at the moment if they are being coupled with Reform in Starmer’s attacks, which are only going to increase as Reform’s polling lead continues. As with the Budget, Starmer probably did enough to keep his backbenchers at bay today, but his performance won’t have reassured the country.
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