Where’s Rishi Sunak? That’s the latest attack line from Labour politicians after the Prime Minister missed this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions to attend a service for the NHS at Westminster Abbey. He will also miss next week’s affair to attend a Nato summit. In Sunak’s place, his deputy Oliver Dowden stood at the despatch box where he faced Keir Starmer’s deputy Angela Rayner. She quickly brought up Sunak’s absence, suggesting it showed that the Tories had given up. Dowden – who has several years’ experience writing jokes for Tory leaders for PMQs – snapped back that ‘some leaders trust their deputies’.
When pressed, there is no Labour frontbench politician who seems to directly be saying that Sunak should have missed the NHS service (which Keir Starmer also attended) or that Sunak should give Nato a miss next week. Speaking on the BBC’s Politics Live today, shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth suggested that Sunak’s sin was to not suggest that the service started at a different time when his team will have first got wind of it.
One area Rayner pushed particularly hard on was the plight of renters
Although Sunak and Starmer were both absent, the general debate was pretty familiar. Rayner went on the attack over Tory failures on housebuilding and the mortgage time-bomb. Dowden responded by arguing Labour would be worse for the economy as the party’s spending plans – such as borrowing for green investment – would push up inflation. One area Rayner pushed particularly hard on was the plight of renters, stating that no-fault evictions are up by 116 per cent this year. Dowden said his party is backing renters, having introduced legislation to strengthen their rights. However, the risk for the government is that rising interest rates lead to a situation where neither homeowners or renters feel the Conservatives have their back.
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