We learned very little from Prime Minister’s Questions today. Both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak used attack lines from previous weeks – ones that they will probably repeat until the next general election – and didn’t stray into any new areas.
The Leader of the Opposition wanted to mock the Tory performance in last week’s local elections. Meanwhile, Sunak wanted to exploit Labour nerves that, despite Starmer’s party doing well last week, it didn’t seem to be out of a newfound enthusiasm for Labour among voters.
It’s going to be a very long and boring road if PMQs carries on like this
Starmer told the chamber that the Prime Minister would have to give another update on employment numbers ‘now he’s cost 1,000 Tory councillors their jobs’. In reply, Sunak quoted Tony Blair saying, ‘the right honourable gentleman can be as cocky as he likes about the local elections: come the general election, policy counts. The problem for him is he doesn’t have any!’
Starmer had a particularly savage, and effective, comeback. He argued that ‘the Prime Minister has only had to fight for two things in his life. Last year, he lost a Tory beauty contest to the member for Southwest Norfolk, who then lost to a lettuce. Last week, when he finally came into contact with voters, he lost everywhere.’
Sunak decided, for reasons best known to him, to reproduce and indeed develop his weird ice cream insult for Starmer. He said that, after a long list of promises the Labour leader had already broken, ‘he’s not just a softy, he’s the flaky too!’
They kept going in this pointless, soundbite-focused vein. Sunak claimed Rachel Reeves had recently discovered that she needed to be able to say where the money was going to come from, and Starmer referred to Theresa May as ‘one of his more electorally successful predecessors’.
Disruptive protesters, non-dom tax status and the oil and gas company profits: they were all there, as they are every single week. At one point, Starmer appeared to have his notes from a previous session jumbled in. He talked, once again, about ‘a Prime Minister who boasts he’s never had a working class friend’ and who was ‘smiling his way through the cost-of-living crisis, gloating about success while waiting lists grow’.
However far away the next election is, it’s going to be a very long and boring road if PMQs carries on like this.
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