Who won PMQs this week? Not Kemi Badenoch, nor Keir Starmer for that matter. In fact, the real winner wasn’t in the chamber at all: Wes Streeting emerged from the session in even better shape than he was before Downing Street decided to launch an extraordinary briefing round against him.
The jokes about the instability at the top of the government began even before the exchange between the leader of the ppposition and the Prime Minister. When Starmer gave his conventional first answer, that he had been having ‘meetings with ministerial colleagues and others’ this morning, there were loud guffaws from the benches opposite. Then Tory Lincoln Jopp offered Starmer advice from his own experience serving in the army in West Africa and surviving ‘a bloody attempted coup’, called last week’s session ‘an absolute binfire’ and asked him to ‘promise the House that he will never, ever, ever be away on a Wednesday again’.
Badenoch opened her questions on the matter too. ‘This morning, on the BBC, the Health Secretary said there is a toxic culture in Downing Street that needs to change. He’s right, isn’t he?’
Starmer replied: ‘My focus each and every day is on rebuilding and renewing our country. But let me be absolutely clear. Any attack on any member of my Cabinet is completely unacceptable. In relation to the Health Secretary, he promised before the election that in the first year of a Labour government, we would deliver 2 million extra appointments. We didn’t deliver 2 million or 3 or 4, we delivered 5 million extra appointments.’ He explained that Streeting was in Manchester making an announcement about investment in the frontline of the NHS and added: ‘He’s doing a great job, as is the whole of my Cabinet.’
Badenoch joked that the waiting list Streeting was interested in wasn’t the one in the NHS. She then said Starmer’s allies had also accused the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband of launching leadership bids. ‘These attacks came from No. 10,’ she said. ‘Nowhere else: his toxic No.10.’ This was a good second question, as Starmer had addressed the briefings against Streeting as though they were abstract and unconnected to him. Badenoch added: ‘The person responsible for the culture in No. 10 is his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. Does the Prime Minister have full confidence in him?’
Starmer replied in an exasperated tone that Morgan McSweeney and his team were ‘absolutely focused on delivering for the country’. He added that ‘of course I have never authorised attacks on Cabinet members’ (though that is of course different from saying that you have said your team can’t attack Cabinet members, or indeed that your team definitely haven’t been doing it). Starmer returned to NHS waiting lists in an attempt to bring the discussion back to the government’s activities, rather than the drama around the government.
Badenoch pointed out that Starmer hadn’t given full confidence to McSweeney and that therefore Starmer had lost control of No. 10. She said the government had descended ‘into civil war’ and then mocked ‘the feral MPs that No. 10 has been talking about’. She then jokingly based her next question on the briefing that there would be a ‘market meltdown’ if Starmer was replaced, asking: ‘Why does the Prime Minister think that there would be a market meltdown if the Health Secretary took over?’
Starmer’s assertion that ‘this is a united team’ is a claim that no one ever makes unless there are serious suggestions of instability and disunity. He then tried to talk about growth, investment and so on in order to change the subject rather than continue to entertain the questions about government turmoil. Badenoch accused him of desperately clinging on to his job, and then brought up the latest unemployment figures. Starmer replied that more people were in work than at the start of the year, and then listed the things Labour was doing to get more people into work. This prompted an exchange about what the Tories had done for jobs, and then the accusation from Badenoch that Labour was in a ‘tax doom loop’ from which it could only escape if it cut spending. She then turned to the two child benefit cap, and asked: ‘So why is the Prime Minister instead offering welfare giveaways to save his own skin?’
Starmer was forced to spend much of PMQs apologising
The Prime Minister replied that the government had been forced to put up National Insurance by the ‘mess’ left by the Tories. He demanded to know what the Conservatives would do instead, to which Badenoch replied: ‘I wouldn’t have made the stupid mistake in the first place of putting up the jobs tax and killing off jobs.’ She then listed all the ways in which the Cabinet had been making mistakes, culminating in: ‘Mr Speaker it is not just him, it is all of them, there is no replacement, it is all of them. Two weeks before the Budget, isn’t it the case that this Prime Minister has lost control of his government, he’s lost the confidence of his party and he’s lost the trust of the British people?’
Starmer didn’t agree, funnily enough. But the fact he was forced to spend much of Prime Minister’s Questions apologising to one of his Cabinet and insisting that everyone was getting on fine shows quite how badly awry things have gone – and quite how quickly. Starmer was able to list things the government was doing, but he didn’t reassure his backbenchers by offering a sense of what he really wants to be doing, other than by making a vague comment about ‘renewal’. Starmer didn’t emerge from PMQs in a better position, but the man who his aides took aim at last night did.
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