Kemi Badenoch may well have been right in the points that she made at Prime Minister’s Questions, but she managed to go about making them in the wrong way. The Tory leader focused on the many contradictions between the government’s focus on economic growth and its policies, but her phrasing of her questions and her attempts to defend the Conservative legacy made it easy for Keir Starmer to ridicule the questions, rather than answer them.
The Prime Minister had also set up a planted question before his exchanges with Badenoch which meant he was already developing a theme about the Tories and the state pension before the leader of the opposition had even stood up. Labour backbencher Damien Egan asked Starmer to confirm that Labour would ‘always protect the state pension and the triple lock’, which Starmer duly did. Badenoch then quoted Starmer’s own ‘growth test’, that if a policy was not good for growth then he would not approve it. She added:
‘When the Conservatives left office, we had the fastest economic growth in the G7. But what is the government doing for growth now? It’s destroying it. Let’s look at the Employment Bill. The government’s own figures say it will cost business £5 billion a year. It clearly fails the Prime Minister’s growth test. Will he drop it?’
Starmer immediately ridiculed the opening statement, saying ‘the proposition they left a golden inheritance was tested on 4 July’. He then listed various endorsements of the economy under Labour, before listing what the government was now doing to encourage growth, and returning to the Tory legacy by quoting Badenoch’s admission in November that it was ‘obvious that we Conservatives lost the confidence of business’.
Badenoch’s next question would have been a strong one had she not trashed it of her own accord by using unparliamentary language. She said: ‘He doesn’t want to talk about the employment bill because he doesn’t know about it. Last week he misled the House…’
She was called to order by the Speaker because you cannot accuse a member of misleading the House. Had she merely said ‘last week he told the House’ or ‘claimed to the House’, Badenoch would not have been interrupted and the she would have maintained the force of her question about Starmer saying one thing without knowing what his government was actually doing.
Starmer continued to defend the Employment Bill, and then once again had a chance to list everything the Chancellor had announced this morning as proof that the government was getting on with pursuing growth, before telling Badenoch that ‘the only policies she’s got is to shrink pensions’, showing the value to him of that planted question.
A worse mistake came when Badenoch then claimed that the Employment Bill ‘means a new employee could start a job in the morning and take their employer to a tribunal that afternoon’. She added: ‘This bill is terrible for business, but it is great employment for lawyers. I know the Prime Minister loves the legal profession, but he needs to stop being a lawyer and start being a leader.’ That statement about tribunals was the sort of thing that Starmer the lawyer loves. He joyfully dissected it, saying: ‘She’s talking absolute nonsense. She knows that anyone who understands anything about the Bill or any employment law will know you can’t start in the morning and go to a tribunal in the afternoon.’
He had also clearly been ready for the ‘lawyer not a leader’ line, because he had crafted his own: ‘We know she’s not a lawyer. She’s clearly not a leader. If she keeps on like this, she is going to be the next lettuce!’
The pair continued to spar, with Badenoch accusing Starmer of ‘arrogance’ and saying the government was mistaken in thinking it can create growth – it comes from business. Again, she had a good point, but the Prime Minister had just reminded everyone of Liz Truss and the lettuce, and he could just bat away her lines by saying the Tories were ‘in no position to give us lectures on anything’. It underlined how much of a task Badenoch has to rebuild the Conservatives’ reputation on the economy, including working out how to get Liz Truss to stop talking (something the Tory leader reportedly raised at shadow cabinet last week, with good reason). But in order to get anywhere close to tackling that task, Badenoch really needs to do better when she’s questioning Starmer, too.
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