Starmer avoids Israel in knockabout with Sunak

It was revealing that Keir Starmer decided not to ask Rishi Sunak about Israel at Prime Minister’s Questions today. The Labour leader headed straight from the session into a crunch meeting with Muslim MPs and peers who are angry at the way he has handled the conflict (more from Katy here), and so he clearly decided that repeating last week’s series of statements about Labour’s support for Israel’s self-defence wouldn’t help internal party tensions. Instead, he went for a proper old political knockabout, and spent the entire session talking about the failed Tory candidate in the Tamworth by-election.

Labour’s victory lap after the two by-elections that it won last week has been rather muted as a result of the situation in the Middle East, but Starmer decided to make up for that today. He riffed on the comments by Andrew Cooper, who while trying to defend the seat for the Conservatives ended up being exposed for sharing online comments saying that people struggling to feed their children should ‘fuck off’ if they still pay £30 phone bills. ‘Where does the Prime Minister think his candidate got the idea in the first place?’ he asked in his second question to Sunak. The Prime Minister kept insisting that he was ‘proud’ of what the government ‘is going to support the most vulnerable’, and even joked that the new Labour MP for Mid-Bedfordshire might support him more than the previous incumbent (Nadine Dorries is no doubt penning a riposte for the Daily Mail right now). He also remarked that Starmer’s ‘prepared lines really aren’t working for him any more’, accusing him of reading ‘from his script to say that we hadn’t answered the question’. The questions weren’t quite working, either: by the time the Labour leader reached his pay-off, the Tamworth theme was exhausted. He said:

The truth is, his candidate in Tamworth summed up perfectly just how he and his Tories are treating the British public. So will he just call a general election… they’ve heard the government telling them to eff off, and they want the chance to return the compliment.

The Israel-Hamas conflict did come up in other questions, including those immediately before Starmer rose, and from the SNP’s Mhairi Black. There was also a heartfelt question from Labour’s Yasmin Qureshi, who said Israel was carrying out ‘collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza for crimes they did not commit. How many more innocent Palestinians must die before this PM calls for a humanitarian ceasefire?’ Sunak’s response might or might not have been intended as a dig at Labour’s tensions: he remarked that ‘there is in fact unity across these dispatch boxes on Israel’s right to defend itself in the face of an unspeakable act of terror’. He and Starmer are continuing to resist calls for a ceasefire, but the levels of tension within Labour may well mean that the Leader of the Opposition has to find another way of reflecting his party’s anxieties.