An ugly Prime Minister’s Questions today which will probably make the Tories wish they didn’t have to call an election for at least five years – and the public wish they didn’t have to endure the campaign that’s heading their way very soon. Inevitably, it was about racism, and inevitably Rishi Sunak had a miserable time.
Starmer replied that he had changed his party but Sunak was scared of his
Sunak did not try to pre-empt the session by announcing that Tory donor Frank Hester’s money would be going to charity, or any other measure suggesting he was taking the matter more seriously than yesterday’s slow crawl towards admitting Hester’s remarks about Diane Abbott were racist. Instead, his defensive tactics were ones we know all too well, because Sunak uses them almost every week: he tried to suggest that Labour was at least as bad as the Tories on racism.
There is much merit in repeating a line in politics: it greatly increases the chances of voters hearing it and maybe even remembering it. The risk, of course, is that it means your opponent has their own retort ready before your exchanges have even started. So this is what happened when Sunak reminded the Commons that Keir Starmer had campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn and that ‘he might want to reflect on the double standards of his deputy leader calling her opponents scum, his shadow foreign secretary comparing Conservatives to Nazis and the man that he wanted to make chancellor talking about lynching a female minister’.
Starmer replied that he had changed his party but Sunak was scared of his, and then again insisted that the Prime Minister was describing a Labour Party that no longer exists. This worked very well for the Labour leader in the session, but as we saw with the Rochdale by-election, it might make him a hostage to fortune in the long-run, as his confidence levels in how deeply he has changed his party might not be in proportion to reality.
However, the most effective way Starmer attacked Sunak was when he said the Prime Minister had invited himself into everyone’s living room to depict himself as a defender of freedom against extremism. And yet days later, he was tongue-tied when Hester’s comments emerged.
Sunak had wanted to talk about the Post Office, but only managed to do so in his opening statement and then again when the questions widened out to other MPs. He had also started the week wanting to talk about the government’s efforts to tackle extremism, but the row about Hester’s comments has made that bit of media planning extremely inconvenient.
The PM claimed to be pleased when Starmer moved onto the Budget, but even on that it was a score draw. Sunak was able to remind people of Labour’s misery on its green spending pledge and that Starmer now had a black hole in his spending plans, that he was opposed to the Tories’ plans to cut national insurance and that this meant higher taxes for Britons. Meanwhile, Starmer retorted that he wasn’t going to commit to Sunak’s ‘£46 billion of unfunded commitments’. He still had the upper hand, though, with a new line: ‘All we need now is an especially hardy lettuce and it could be 2022 all over again.’ That will have stung Sunak almost as much as the first few questions about his integrity.
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