Prime Minister’s Questions is rapidly becoming a challenge for Kemi Badenoch to come up with a topic that the Tories aren’t vulnerable on so she has a decent chance of attacking Keir Starmer. Given things aren’t exactly going swimmingly for the Labour government, it shows how very weak the Conservatives are that Starmer can get through entire sessions of the most dramatic point of the parliamentary week without sustaining even a light scratch. Today, though, the weakness of Badenoch’s attack was not in the topic, but in her own technique. The Tory leader ended up on the defensive instead of the man she was supposed to be questioning.
Starmer clearly couldn’t believe his luck at PMQs
Badenoch decided to make this week’s topic immigration law, opening with the case of a family from Gaza being granted asylum in the UK under the scheme designed for Ukrainians. Starmer replied to say he disagreed with the decision of the courts and that the Home Secretary was already looking at how to close the ‘legal loophole’ enabling that decision. But Badenoch claimed he hadn’t answered the question. Normally she’s right that Starmer hasn’t answered the question, so perhaps she hadn’t heard him today and was in autopilot. The Prime Minister was able to respond:
‘I’ve already said the Home Secretary has already got a team working on closing this loophole. We don’t need to wait for that. We’re getting on with it because we’ve taken back control. They lost control of immigration.’
Badenoch complained again that he wasn’t answering her question. What she wanted to know was whether the government was going to introduce new legislation clarifying the right to a family life, and whether he agreed that ‘we should legislate even if lawyers warn that this might be incompatible with human rights law’.
Starmer clearly couldn’t believe his luck. Badenoch wasn’t doing nearly a good enough job in articulating what she wanted to hear from him, and so it sounded as though she was just repeating automatically that he hadn’t answered the question. He joked:
‘She complains about scripted answers, but her script doesn’t allow her to listen to the answer! She asked me if we’re going to change the law and close the loophole in question one. I said yes. She asked me again in question two, and I said yes. She asked me again in question three, it’s still yes!’
Badenoch doggedly stuck to her question, though the real problem was that she didn’t seem to know what that question was, let alone anyone else.
‘He didn’t listen to question one, she complained. ‘I asked if he would appeal a decision. He did not answer that. He’s not listening. He’s too busy defending the international human rights law framework.’
Starmer the lawyer was in fact too busy enjoying closing the ring he was currently running around the Tory leader.
‘She talks about being on top of her brief,’ he said. ‘She has no idea what she’s talking about. I’ll tell her again. We need to change the law. That’s why the Home Secretary is already closing the gap. I know the script doesn’t allow an adaptation, but this is getting tedious.’
He dismissed her with a final rejection of another story about the chief inspector of borders currently working from Finland, telling her that he would now be working from the UK full-time.
Badenoch is now in the position where Tory backbenchers are starting to outshine her in their questions. A little later in the session, David Reed had a much better one than the six his leader had offered, asking Starmer to use one word to describe his Chagos Islands deal. Starmer used it as an opportunity to attack Badenoch, saying she had refused the offer of a high-level briefing on the matter last week. He is not, as she claimed in her questions, just whining about the last government as a means of deflecting from his own record. He’s now focusing in on Badenoch herself.
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