Kemi Badenoch sees Sir Keir Starmer as a Prime Minister dangling by a thread and she arrived in Prime Minister’s Questions with the equivalent of a giant set of shears. She gives every sign of thinking the PM will not be in the job for much longer – and wants to get the credit for cutting short his time in power.
Why, she asked Sir Keir, are “his own MPs describing him as a caretaker prime minister”?
It is a problem for a PM when newspapers are filled with reports of plotting within their own party. It gets even more uncomfortable when their inability to command the troops is the subject of parliamentary debate. Looking out at the rows of Labour MPs, scores of whom are on course to lose their seats, Mrs Badenoch said “everyone can see he has lost control of his party”.
She then focused on the Labour frontbench whose job it is to run the country, saying: “We all know that this lot are so busy trying to replace him that they have taken their eyes off the ball.”
Sir Keir tried to give Mrs Badenoch a taste of her own dastardly medicine by pointing to former Conservatives abandoning her party for Nigel Farage’s start-up.
Claiming “21 ex-Tory MPs have now left for Reform”, he said: “The real question is: Who’s next?”
Turning his gaze on former leadership contender Robert Jenrick, he said the Shadow Justice Secretary was “twitching”.
Mrs Badenoch was not fazed. After just over a year in the role she has grasped the potential of this weekly questions session to drive the PM nuts.
Like a schoolteacher from Hades, she subjected Sir Keir to a pop quiz on the failings of top cabinet ministers. When she didn’t like an answer, she exclaimed: “WROOOONG!”
The key difference between Mrs Badenoch and Sir Keir is she is having fun. The PM looked like a man who could not wait to get out of the chamber – and who desperately hoped nobody in the outside world had tuned in to watch this spectacle.
The Tory leader described Labour as a party which “wouldn’t know the truth if it punched them in the face”. Sir Keir told her “nobody is listening to anything you have to say”.
This is the type of tactic generations of supply teachers have deployed against disruptive pupils determined to cause mayhem on a Wednesday afternoon. It rarely works in the classroom, and Mrs Badenoch will be counting down the days until her next confrontation in the House of Commons.
