Kemi Badenoch continued with her theme of ‘why can you trust anything the Prime Minister says’ at Prime Minister’s Questions today, covering the economy, the Chagos Islands, Tulip Siddiq and Gerry Adams. The Tory leader also claimed that Starmer was once again not answering the questions that she asked, which was true, but his replies were better than her questions.
Starmer said the Conservatives are ‘economic vandals and fantasists’
Starmer had obviously come armed with the surprisingly good inflation figures, but he also had a number of one liners and attacks that were more effective than those from Badenoch. These included the early description of the Conservatives as ‘economic vandals and fantasists’, which came in his first answer.
Badenoch then accused Rachel Reeves of having ‘ignored all the warnings’ from businesses, who are now saying ‘they will raise prices to cover his jobs tax’ and demanded that Starmer repeat the Chancellor’s promise not to ‘come back for more’. Did this mean, she asked, that there would definitely not be any more tax rises this year? Starmer did not answer the question, saying there were limits to what he could say about this sort of thing from the despatch box. The Prime Minister insisted that the government had an ‘iron-clad commitment to our fiscal rules’ and that ‘we can’t just tax our way out of problems that they left us’. He offered another pronouncement on the Tory record, saying ‘they flatlined the economy’ with the mini budget ‘that crashed the economy’, the worst cost of living crisis and a £22 billion black hole.
Badenoch rightly took issue with the ‘black hole’, saying ‘the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) found no such black hole’, though that did rather suggest she couldn’t contest the other points, other than ‘he talks about a Budget three years ago’. She then talked about the Chagos Islands, with Starmer justifying the deal on the basis that it would protect a vital military base and that the Conservatives had started the negotiations.
Badenoch said there was ‘no one he can blame for this dud deal but himself’ and then went back to the economy with a personal attack on Rachel Reeves. She said Labour had been so busy celebrating having the first female Chancellor ‘instead of ensuring that the country had someone actually qualified to do the job’. She then asked whether there would be just one Budget this year, with Starmer replying that ‘she will be pleased to know the Chancellor will be in place for many many years to come, she’ll outstrip them’. Behind him on the government frontbench, Reeves offered a rare smile.
There was then a dispiriting exchange over Tulip Siddiq, which followed the pattern of so many at Prime Minister’s Questions: the Leader of the Opposition raises something bad that a Labour minister has done and Starmer argues that it’s still not as bad as things were under the Tories. Hardly the whiter than white pitch he made in the run up to the election. He compared Siddiq’s swift resignation to Priti Patel being found to have breached the Ministerial Code and not resigning when she was Home Secretary. She was still on the frontbench now, he pointed out. ‘What a contrast! Thank God the British public chucked them out,’ he said.
Having already talked about the mini budget, Starmer saved his favourite attack device until the end. He quoted from Liz Truss’s legal letter which complained that Starmer saying she had crashed the economy was damaging her reputation. He added that ‘it was actually crashing the economy that was damaging her reputation’. It hasn’t diminished Truss’s power to make PMQs uncomfortable for the opposition party, even when it’s supposed to be the government in the firing line.
Katy Balls, Michael Gove and Kate Andrews discuss PMQs on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast, alongside the latest economic data and the debate about compensation for Gerry Adams:
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