Sunak and Starmer turn nasty again at PMQs

Keir Starmer is very fond of giving ‘deeply personal’ interviews where he tries to bring some colour to his grey suited image. He is also increasingly keen on deeply personal attacks on Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions, as today’s session showed. 

The Labour leader ramped up his attacks on Sunak as a ludicrously rich, out-of-touch leader, telling the Commons the PM was ‘clueless about life outside of his bubble’, of regarding contactless cards as being something from Mars, and of ‘smiling his way through the cost of living crisis’. He reminded MPs of the old video of a young Sunak boasting that he didn’t know any working class people, and of the more recent clip of him telling voters in Tunbridge Wells that he’d diverted money from poorer areas to richer seats such as theirs. 

Sunak for his part was ready with his own personal attacks, presumably feeling they had been licensed both by Starmer’s own questions at PMQs and also the recent controversial Labour campaign graphics.

For the second week running, the PM talked about Starmer’s ‘own special pension scheme’, arguing it was ‘one law for him and a tax rise for everybody else’. He also accused Labour of siding with extremist protesters (with their stance on the Public Order Bill), with polluters (after their confused attempt at another sewage rebellion in the House yesterday) and of preparing to side with people smugglers today on the Illegal Migration Bill. He also joked that ‘if he has any actual ideas for the economy, he should just say so’. 

What the whole thing amounted to wasn’t entirely clear. Both men touched on all sorts of different policy issues – the economy, environment, immigration and protest – but were really just trying to talk about personality, burrowing away at what they thought from their focus groups were their opponent’s main weaknesses. It was a bit like the ‘deeply personal’ interviews, really: they’re not a bad thing per se, but they can’t disguise a lack of substance, whether it be government achievements or opposition policy. 

The rest of the session was unremarkable. Dominic Raab, who resigned as deputy prime minister last week following the findings of an investigation into his alleged bullying, wasn’t even mentioned until the last few minutes when an SNP MP bravely raised the question of standards and culture. Sunak joked ‘it is somewhat odd to be getting lectures right now on values from the SNP’.

There was also a strange question from Tory MP Robert Goodwill on what the Prime Minister thinks of someone who spends time with Putin and refers to him as a ‘dear friend’. A number of Labour frontbenchers froze: shadow leader of the House Thangam Debbonaire had a furrowed brow as she tried to work out if this was another gaffe from one of her backbench colleagues. It was actually a reference to Xi Jinping.