Given bonus PMQs tilt at Keir, Kemi fails to land a blow

Today was never meant to have been this way. The plan had been to prorogue on Tuesday night ahead of next week’s elections and the state opening the week after. No need for Keir Starmer to face a last prime minister’s questions of the parliament. Time to catch his breath. Put his feet up. Recover from the near constant noise of the Peter Mandelson scandal and leadership challenges.

Start to prepare his excuses ahead of predicted losses. Pencil in a reshuffle. Some of his cabinet ministers were looking decidedly queasy on the government frontbench. Even the good ones. The chronicle of a death foretold. Always handy to have colleagues you can sacrifice to save your own skin. If only temporarily. When you are prime minister, every extra day in No 10 matters.

But situation normal all fucked up. For reasons no one fully clearly understands, prorogation got delayed until lunchtime on Wednesday. Even though the last bit of government legislation was completed late on Tuesday. Maybe the Tories dragged their heels just long enough to give Kemi Badenoch a bonus tilt at Keir. Maybe Labour messed up the timings without any help from the Tories. Either way, there was no way out. One more PMQs it was.

If Starmer was mildly irritated about returning to the Commons less than 24 hours after the blatant opportunism of the Tories forcing a privileges committee vote, then it didn’t show. He may not always be as competent as you would like, but you can’t fault his professionalism. He puts in the hard yards. There again, even on a bad day, PMQs is seldom his totally unhappy place.

Step forward Kemi. The Tory leader who is guaranteed to make Starmer look better than he actually is. It’s partly her patronising tone that grates even with her own supporters. A sure-fire way to lose any audience. Then there’s the questions themselves. Always likely to somehow just miss the point. Even when Keir looks to be there for the taking.

Most of all, she has a way of getting Labour backbenchers to rally round the prime minister. They may not like Keir. Some may even want to replace him. But they want to do it in a way and a time of their choosing. They don’t want to give Kemi the satisfaction of claiming the credit. Just by opening her mouth, Kemi gives Keir a stay of execution. She could be his secret weapon.

Starmer began by saying how well the king’s visit was going in the US. He, more than most, should know better than to read too much into anything Donald Trump says or does. Obviously it’s a good sign that Charles and The Donald are still talking to one another, but there’s every chance that by the weekend the president will have totally forgotten the state visit ever happened and will be back to slagging off the UK.

Then we got down to business. If you can call it that. What we really got was two leaders hellbent on cultivating election soundbites for their social media channels. And they didn’t even do it that well, though Keir will have come away the happier. He took no damage – a win, under the circumstances – and sounded energised and fired up.

It’s just that you can’t escape the fact that both parties would probably do better with a different leader. Keir and Kemi have been flatlining in the polls. Both remain unpopular. Yet neither is going anywhere without a fight. Anyone thinking Keir will fall on his sword after the local election results next Friday has misread the situation badly. He will be inside Downing Street. Chained to a radiator. Shades of Gordon Brown.

Kemi began by noting it was the end of the session. What a change from the beginning, she said. Then there were adoring backbenchers queueing up to ask sycophantic questions. Now he had to beg them to vote for him. Except he didn’t. The backbenchers may not be quite so adoring but they weren’t going to give Kemi a win on her privileges committee stunt. And they were still more than capable of asking sycophantic questions. Time and again they would stand up to ask Starmer why he was so brilliant and of what he was most proud.

“There are 1.5 million more people out of work,” Kemi insisted. This was a blatant lie. A misrepresentation of the universal credit figures. Keir missed a trick. He could have asked the speaker to hold a further privileges committee debate to examine whether Kemi had deliberately misled parliament. Come to think of it, he could have asked for a buy one get one free offer. Kemi has been lying about her desire to join the war for the past two months.

The rest of the exchanges were regulation nonsense. Borderline mediocre. Much ado about nothing. Kemi would mention the welfare bill and defence spending. Keir would point out that it was the Tories who had doubled the welfare budget and had hollowed out defence. We didn’t get anything on immigration. For the time being, that is dead in the water as an issue. Even Reform has noticed that the numbers have dropped significantly.

Kemi became temporarily excited when she thought she had a gotcha moment after Starmer failed to say he wouldn’t sack his chancellor. But no one else in the chamber paid any attention. Rachel Reeves isn’t going anywhere so long as Keir remains prime minister. They are joined at the hip. The jeopardy for the chancellor is when Starmer goes. Still, it made Kemi happy. And that has to count for something.

We ended with a torrent of abuse. Starmer was wetting himself playing political games, Kemi observed. Er … The only one playing political games in the last week has been her. She has no one to blame but herself for failing to make the Mandelson mud stick. She failed to realise that Starmer’s real mistake was appointing Mandy in the first place. It was his judgment at fault. Not whether the right processes were followed.

“I’m sick of THIS MAN’S pompous moralising,” she concluded. It could just be me, but the whole country is fed up with pompous moralising from politicians of all parties. It’s their default setting these days. If you can’t win with an argument then faux piety has to do instead.

And no one is better at this than Ed Davey. Normally he is the one leader who can be relied on to talk human. But even he has now taken to homilies after backing the Tory motion the day before. The prime minister took no prisoners, saying this had been a stunt too far even for a man in a wetsuit. Late in the day, Keir was beginning to enjoy himself.