Kemi Badenoch was on good, brutal form at Prime Minister’s Questions today. Keir Starmer had tried to spike her guns by using a planted question to tell the chamber at the start that as the economy improved, he wanted to see more pensioners eligible for winter fuel payment. But the Tory leader still managed to make Starmer – and his party – look uncomfortable. Her most potent line was a taunt: ‘He can’t see them, but they all look sick just hearing what it is he’s going to do.’ Enough Labour MPs have expressed worries about the government’s policies on benefits, immigration and aid that her accusation rang true, even though some of Starmer’s backbenchers theatrically laughed at her.
The Tory leader did try with her opening question to keep defending her party’s record, which was a misstep: she was so busy reacting to the criticism of the Conservatives in Starmer’s earlier answer that she didn’t major on the announcement that voters were more interested in: the winter fuel payment policy change. Badenoch continued to pursue her arguments about the Conservative economic legacy for too long. She later asked him to confirm whether he was going to U-turn on the winter fuel payment, which allowed him to say he had already given an answer on this matter, even though he had not given any further details other than that he wanted more pensioners to become eligible.
But Badenoch was largely very good. She made her questions as much about how uncomfortable Labour MPs are feeling about their government’s policies as she did about the policies themselves. Given PMQs is as much about rallying the troops as it is sending any kind of message to the public, this was a smart move. She exploited the leaked memo from Angela Rayner calling for tax rises, describing the situation thus: ‘He’s lost control of the economy, he’s lost control of his cabinet!’
Starmer’s answers were quite flat. He kept referring to the Tories’ legacy as his method of deflecting the criticism, which was more about new tax rises than it was about welfare cuts. Simply announcing a change of policy on one matter did not blunt the attacks on the government, because there are so many different troubled issues. Badenoch told MPs that ‘the whole house will have heard the prime minister refuse to rule out more tax cuts’.
She ridiculed the hundreds of MPs who ‘went over the top’ to support the winter fuel payment cut last year, and punched their bruise by asking: ‘Hands up who here wanted winter fuel cuts? Not a single one of them. The fact of the matter is this Prime Minister is destroying them, they need to look at what they are doing to the country. The truth is we all know it is this Prime Minister, this Labour government and their policies that are shafting the country isn’t it?’
Labour MPs will not have come away from this event feeling better about the direction of their government. Starmer claimed that ‘they look in pretty good shape to me – and there’s lots of them’, but his problem is that a lot of them aren’t happy.
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