Kemi Badenoch had an odd line of attack at Prime Minister’s Questions: she chose to pursue Keir Starmer over what he knew about Louise Haigh’s fraud conviction. It is not a story that has any impact on people outside Westminster, but it did still highlight how much Starmer has become like the politicians he used to ridicule: he did not answer the questions at all and often ended up making points about the Tories being just as bad as Labour.
The Conservative leader initially mocked Starmer for using a planted question from an overly loyal Labour backbencher about immigration to celebrate what he was doing to control Britain’s borders. Badenoch pointed out that Labour had voted against all of the Tories’ measures on immigration, before moving onto what she said had been ‘on the lips’ of every Labour MP, which was his appointment of a ‘convicted fraudster to be his Transport Secretary’. Starmer sounded almost bored as he replied that ‘the previous Transport Secretary was right when further information came forward to resign’. Badenoch accused him of ‘obfuscating but I am going to keep him on the topic’, and demanded what the further information was. Starmer replied that he was not going to ‘disclose private conversations’, and then said his government was ‘getting on with fixing the mess, fixing the foundations’. That was almost a verbatim copy of the kind of thing that Rishi Sunak used to do when he was the Prime Minister responding to Starmer’s questions from the opposition benches.
‘He never answers any questions,’ complained Badenoch, which was clearly what she had set out to say when prepping for this session. Starmer was never going to offer further information about Haigh, which was why the Tory leader chose that topic, because it guaranteed she would be able to accuse the Prime Minister of dodging questions. She moved onto ‘an even bigger fraud, the Budget’, and pushed Starmer further on whether Labour was going to raise taxes and cut spending again. Mel Stride and others have been pushing Rachel Reeves repeatedly to make the same pledge to the Commons that she made to the CBI about not having another Budget like the one she announced this autumn, and once again, Starmer dodged that invitation, telling Badenoch she should be celebrating the OECD upgrading Britain’s growth forecast.
The pair then descended into what could turn into a weekly exchange of the same lines: Starmer saying any criticism from Badenoch was a bit rich coming from the party ‘who broke the economy’, and Badenoch saying voters shouldn’t trust a word he said. Not an enlightening session at all.
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