Prime Minister’s Questions. The highlight of the political week. The best free show in town. The moment the government is held to account. It is all those things of course, but most of all, it is a chance for unknown Labour MPs to suck up to Keir Starmer. It’s not easy for them: there are so many of them, and they need him to notice them if they’re ever to be ministers. This is the one chance they get. But knowing this doesn’t make it any less excruciating to watch.
Not since the Spanish Inquisition gave up their red hotpokers had anyone faced such a painful question
The chamber was jammed, of course, as was the public gallery. People had queued for hours to get in, waiting for their chance to see, perhaps for the only time in their lives, democracy at its rawest. Were they rewarded? My goodness they were. Surely they will tell their grandchildren of the moment Glasgow East’s John Grady asked whether the prime minister agreed that the government was “putting money in the pockets of pensioners in Glasgow and across the United Kingdom”. Why, not since the Spanish Inquisition gave up their red hotpokers had anyone faced such a painful question.
Not that Grady ended there. My goodness no. This latter-day Torquemada wasn’t going to be satisfied until he knew whether Starmer also agreed “that this rise is possible only because of Labour’s plan for change and our commitment to the triple lock?”
It would have been a fearsome question, reminiscent of Frost piercing Nixon and Walden skewering Thatcher, of Jeremy Paxman hounding Michael Howard and Robin Day taunting John Nott, were it not that, as Grady began the final line with the traditional “does the prime minister agree with me?”, somewhere a wag yelled “No!”
At this, opposition MPs fell about. Grady paused for silence, looking peeved, and a mock “Oooooh!” went up from the Tory benches. It is such moments of sixth-form rebellion that keep them sane.
By some astonishing stroke of good fortune, Starmer had an answer written out for him that precisely fitted Grady’s question. Couldn’t have fitted it better if the person who wrote the answer had also written the question, in fact. Grady was, he said “absolutely right” — what are the odds? — Labour was in fact only able to commit to the pensions triple lock because it had “restored stability”.
The exchange was bait for the Tories, so obviously bait that only someone unable to resist bait would rise to it. Which brings us to Kemi Badenoch.
There has been some online debate about the most Kemi Badenoch thing Kemi Badenoch has done this week. Is it announcing that, while she hadn’t seen the Netflix show Adolescence, she had heard and been convinced by an online conspiracy theory about the show propagated by Elon Musk? Is it holding a press conference about economic policy and then complaining that people kept asking her about economic policy? Or is it, once again, diving headlong after the obvious piece of bait that the prime minister had dangled in front of her?
“The triple lock was a Conservative policy,” she began, but got no further. It seems likely that the prime minister had a taunt of his own ready for her, but he was beaten to the punch by the Liberal Democrats, who erupted with amused outrage at what we these days call cultural appropriation. Did the Tory leader not know that the pensions triple lock was an idea they had brought into government? They shouted and waved, trying to get her to look round and delighted when she refused to.
She didn’t quite recover her stride after that. She attacked the tax rises coming into force. “Out there they are calling it ‘Awful April’,” she claimed, which seems highly unlikely. Two along from her, shadow home secretary Chris Philp sat, legs spread wide in what driving instructors call the “ten to two” position, forcing Mel Stride to scrunch himself up as small as he could. Whatever the medical condition is that forces Philp to sit that way, he should simply make an appointment with the Parliament nurse. She’ll probably have seen worse.
Badenoch turned to Donald Trump’s incoming tariffstravaganza, asking why the government hadn’t simply got America to agree to the draft trade deal that she now claims to have negotiated. There’s something marvellous about her belief, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that the president takes any more notice of trade deals than Godzilla takes of Japanese fishing boats.
Answering her, the prime minister was, for the occasion, surprisingly unhistrionic. “We are taking a calm, pragmatic approach and keeping our feet on the ground,” he said. The house went quiet listening to him: at some level MPs sense that dealing with Trump is impossible and all anyone can hope to do is mitigate the damage. Even Ed Davey, who is enjoying being the only party leader able to say what most of the others are thinking, doesn’t really criticise Starmer for not calling the president a pillock in public.
And then Damien Egan, the Labour MP for Bristol North East, rose to ask whether the prime minister agreed with him that the west of England needs a Labour mayor. I’ll leave you to guess the answer.
