Starmer’s performances at PMQs confirm his leadership is on the road to extinction
The Prime Minister is suffering under intense scrutiny from Kemi Badenoch, and is useless at defending his record
I’m something of a prude when it comes to screen violence, so midday on Wednesdays has now become that time when I know I am going to be wincing. It’s Prime Minister’s Questions, and that means the weekly punishment meted out by Kemi Badenoch to Sir Keir Starmer.
But for all the understandable focus on her newfound ability to run rings round the PM, the real story of PMQs isn’t about Badenoch. It’s about Starmer.
We’ve been told for years that PMQs is simply pantomime. That it’s not real and makes no difference to anything outside Westminster. William Hague was a master of the art and much good it did him.
In a sense that’s all true. But that’s because the focus is usually on the leader of the opposition and how well – or badly – they are doing.
What we are now seeing, however, is the real importance of PMQs, at least for this Prime Minister and this Government. Because what we are watching every Wednesday at midday is the latest instalment in the collapse of the Prime Minister – a story played out and crystallised in weekly episodes in front of Labour MPs. With every passing week of PMQs, the end of Starmer’s stint as PM – as “caretaker PM”, to use the phrase deployed with withering brutality by Badenoch today – is getting ever more certain and ever closer.
It’s fascinating to look back at how this has happened. For months the story was how awful Badenoch was at PMQs – she was wooden, according to the received wisdom. She couldn’t think on her feet and she had no idea how to land a joke. She’d be gone in November when Tory MPs could start to lodge those letters of no-confidence we got so used to when they were in power.
It’s true that she wasn’t much good at PMQs initially. She was finding her feet and finding her tone. In response, Starmer would patronise her as if she was some impudent female who was completely out of her depth. But even then Starmer’s tone towards her looked awful, and those of us who have long admired and rated Badenoch had a sense that his patronising demeanour would start to backfire.
Talk about an understatement. Not only has she developed the knack of hitting Starmer’s weakest spots every week, Badenoch goes in for the jugular with a smile and withering humour – far more effective and destructive than huffing and puffing. And when still he tries, in response, to patronise her, it is disastrous.
The past two weeks are typical. Last week she had a riot mocking him by simply repeating a quote from a Cabinet minister that the Budget was “a disaster from start to finish”. “Was it her? Was it him? It was probably her!” she joked, pointing at the Government front bench, finishing with the Chancellor.
Even Labour MPs couldn’t help laughing – the nervous laugh of those who know how dire their situation really is. All Starmer could do in response was drone on about the financial black hole that the world and his wife now knows doesn’t exist.
This week’s humiliation of Starmer was by devoting each of her questions to the various ministers mooted to be scheming against him, using them as a framing mechanism to ask about teacher, police and NHS appointment numbers and the cost of energy.
It was brutal, not least because he could only muster some pre-prepared “jokes” which he muttered away, followed by his usual reference to Liz Truss. He still tries the same patronising shtick, but it’s like watching some embittered has-been who “coulda been a contender” but has been left behind.
It may well be that Badenoch’s weekly brilliance at PMQ has as little impact at propelling her towards electoral success as it did Hague. But one thing is as certain as dammit: every Wednesday we are watching Badenoch carefully, brutally and damningly twist the political knife further into Starmer’s dwindling career.
[Source: The Grauniad]
