Whisper it, but there was some rather good lines amid the dross of today’s PMQs. ‘Mr Speaker, I asked the Prime Minister what he believes in’, jibed Kemi Badenoch at one point. ‘He had to look in his folder to find out the answer.’ The Speaker responded in kind. ‘Please’, he said, during one of Keir Starmer’s lengthier evasions, ‘Let’s listen to the answer even if you don’t believe you’re getting one.’
But it was one word, repeated more than a dozen times, which emerged from today’s session: chaos. Badenoch hit the PM with it at every chance, pointing to the winter fuel and two-child benefit U-turns as proof of the ‘chaos, chaos, chaos’ in which, she said, this government is now embroiled. This marked a novel break with the usual tedium of these exchanges, in which Starmer endlessly refers to the mini-Budget while posing as the embodiment of Labour’s supposed stability premium.
Against this jabbering of a single word, the Prime Minister struggled to really find his form. He began with a nice line of patronising contempt after Badenoch asked him about winter fuel. ‘Well I’m glad to see she’s catching up with what happened two weeks ago’, he said, cooly – a reference to the Tory leader’s much-criticised response when the U-turn was first answered. Yet after that, he somewhat lost his way, as Badenoch noted several times his unwillingness to answer basic questions.
Facing a Labour government with a majority worthy of Pyongyang, Badenoch has clearly decided to spread discord among the government ranks. She name-checked the PM’s chief of staff, suggesting that Starmer ‘has to ask Morgan McSweeney what he believes in.’ For now, such a name is still somewhat unknown outside SW1; Badenoch clearly hopes to make the advisor the story.
Coming ahead of next week’s Spending Review, with Labour tensions over welfare running high, her questions were aimed squarely at the government’s sore spots. ‘The canned forced laugher, the planted questions, all this is going to disappear’, she warned Starmer. He retorted by quoting the Russian embassy’s praise of her misspoken interview on Sky News.
Ed Davey, predictably, brought up Donald Trump’s tariffs, using a trite analogy of the President as a school bully. He has ‘taken our lunch money’, he told the House and is now ‘coming back for more’. In a world of chaos, as Badenoch said, it was a reminder that some things still remain the same. But Sarah Pochin nearly stole the headlines, by asking the PM if he would ban the burqa. She, like others in her party, looks set to cause their own special brand of chaos in the years ahead.
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