PMQs: Starmer’s attacks on crime flop

Rishi Sunak isn’t giving evidence to the Privileges Committee’s inquiry today. Nevertheless, he got his defence on partygate in anyway when he took Prime Minister’s Questions.

In one of his answers to Keir Starmer, Sunak told the chamber that the fine he received was investigated by a ‘senior civil servant’. He added: ‘The findings of which confirmed that I had no advance knowledge about what had been planned, having arrived early for a meeting.’ Then he joked that the Labour leader ‘doesn’t need me to tell him that: he’s probably spoken to the report’s author much more frequently than I have’. This, of course, was a reference to Sue Gray, whose name is likely to crop up a lot later today. It wasn’t the only slightly embittered sounding joke from either leader in what was a rather odd session.

Starmer led his questions on the Casey review into the Metropolitan Police, saying he accepted its findings in full, before asking whether the Prime Minister did too. Sunak responded that the government had already taken a number of steps and was working with the Mayor of London to ensure that the Met works ‘hard to regain the trust’ of the public.

The pair then had a spat over whether the Conservatives were taking police reform and crime rates sufficiently seriously. Labour sees law and order as a key battleground at the next election, therefore Starmer was as keen to talk about his party’s own policies as he was to scrutinise what the government was doing. Sunak wanted to muddy the waters by pointing to Casey’s finding that the relationship between the Met and the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan was ‘dysfunctional’.

The Labour leader claimed that on Sunak’s watch, 98 per cent of rapists had never come before the courts. The Prime Minister said in response that there was a 65 per cent increase in convictions for rape last year – though it is worth pointing out that this still only means a 71 per cent charge rate and a 62 per cent conviction rate.

These exchanges were perfectly ordinary. What made the session a bit weird, however, was that neither Sunak nor Starmer managed to match the seriousness of the crimes under discussion with their tone. Because they both see this as a key political battleground, they found it too easy to descend into knockabout, with a rather rubbish set of jibes about who spent more time on the ‘streets of Britain’ and whether North London or North Yorkshire was further away from London. Starmer told Sunak he needed to ‘get out of Westminster – and I don’t mean to Malibu – to the streets of Britain’. Sunak replied that ‘Noth Yorkshire is a lot further away than North London’.

The Labour leader also mocked the Prime Minister’s partygate fine, saying the only criminal investigation Sunak had been involved in was the one that found him guilty of breaking the law. Both were straining at the leash for a proper political punch-up, but Starmer was trying to say that Britons were frightened of crime and worried that those crimes wouldn’t be prosecuted. His attacks didn’t quite match that.