Keir Starmer had a much better Prime Minister’s Questions than Rishi Sunak today. The main reason for this was that the Labour leader had come with a clear thesis about the Tories breaking public services and Sunak not noticing. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister had brought along a bizarre insult for his opponent. While Starmer ridiculed the claim by Conservative party chair Greg Hands that public services are in ‘good shape’, Sunak derided the opposition leader as ‘Sir Softy’. At one point he claimed ‘that’s why they call him Sir Softy’ – even though ‘they’ could only possibly refer to the aides he had been preparing for the session with, and even though Sir Softy sounds more like the name for an ice cream van than someone voters might reject at the ballot box.
Much like a child trying to work out whether the ice cream was going to come down their street next, Sunak was also not entirely sure where Sir Softy was going with his questions. As a result, he resorted to producing pre-emptive lines about Tory achievements on health spending and sentencing.
Sunak knew there was a trap looming
These filler lines were the only answer he could possibly give when the Labour leader laid a trap for the PM with this question:
‘Either the Prime Minister doesn’t use the same public services as the rest of us, or he simply can’t see the damage they’ve done to our country. In 2019, a convicted people smuggler threw boiling water over a prison officer, leaving him with first degree burns. The prison officer said it felt like acid, his face was on fire. His attacker was found guilty, received a prison sentence, quite right in my view. Does the Prime Minister agree?’
It was a smart question, from the throwaway line reminding people that Sunak has used private health and education for his family, to the abrupt stop. Sunak knew there was a trap looming. But he couldn’t see how he would be trapped, so once again he had to resort to talking about the Tories’ record on sentencing. Starmer returned with the details: that the sentence ended up being suspended in this case because it took 16 months for the attacker to be charged and another two years before he was sentenced. ‘He’s letting violent criminals go free,’ he claimed.
The exchanges deteriorated somewhat from here on, with Starmer bizarrely reading some praise for his record as Director of Public Prosecutions from the Home Affairs Select Committee which was then endorsed by the government. It was part of Starmer’s bid to remind the public that the ‘Sir’ bit of ‘Sir Softy’ came from public service not inherited wealth, and that the ‘Softy’ claim doesn’t work either. But it sounded a bit daft. He recovered a bit with the claim that ‘nothing seems to work at all’, which was better.
Sunak then accused Starmer of coming up with ‘his own special law’ to protect his own pension, saying: ‘one law for him and tax rises for everyone else.’ It was about as good a payoff as you could hope for after a difficult session for the Prime Minister.
Unusually, the PM enjoyed a breather after these exchanges because Stephen Flynn had his two questions as SNP Westminster leader. Flynn joked that the Prime Minister had ‘an equally peaceful and relaxing Easter break as I did’ – a reference to the mayhem in his own party – before making a quip about Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross.
Sunak pointed out that ‘him and his party are focused on other matters: we are just going to motor on with the job’. What will also have comforted him was that there was no Tory complaining from the benches behind him to distract Sunak this week: the party is very much in local election mode now.
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