Kemi Badenoch may want to take a leaf out of Ed Davey’s book for her next PMQs session. This was the new Conservative leader’s second time facing Keir Starmer at the despatch box, and it did not go well.
Partly, this was due to the lack of an obvious topic on which to attack to the Prime Minister this week. Badenoch could have pressed Keir Starmer on his commitment at Cop in Azerbaijan yesterday to set a more ambitious emissions cutting target for the UK, asking how this could be achieved alongside his insistence the government would not tell people how to live their lives. She could have needled him on the number of foreign trips he has been on as PM, which has started to become a story.
Instead, she reverted to what should have been last week’s big topic (had the news of Donald Trump’s election win has not overshadowed everything else) and tried to tear apart Labour’s Budget measures. In the crosshairs specifically was the impact of the employer National Insurance rise (which Labour continues to insist does not count as a tax on “working people”) on councils, small businesses, charities and healthcare providers.
There were two problem with this approach, beyond the obvious observation that the Budget is very much last month’s news.
First was that it opened Badenoch up to the inevitable attack line that the reason councils and government departments alike are so desperately strapped for cash is down to the economic mismanagement of the last Tory government. Starmer gleefully accused the Tories of wanting all the benefits of the extra funding announced in the Budget, while “they don’t know how they’re going to pay for it”. He reeled off a list of things the government was investing in, from the NHS to houses of the future. “If she’s against those things, she should say so,” he said.
“None of us are against any of those thing,” Badenoch replied, but in the absence of alternative suggestions as to how the Tories would fund them, she didn’t sound credible. Nor did she have anything to counter Starmer’s assertion that the Conservatives’ “Magic Money Tree is back after two weeks”. While Badenoch scored a partial hit with her prepared line about Labour’s “copy-and-paste chancellor” (a reference to the accusation Rachel Reeves had plagiarised some sources in her 2023 book on female economists), she was swiftly derailed by Starmer’s response. “She wants to give me advice on running the economy. I don’t mean to be rude, but no thank you very much.”
The second problem was that Badenoch just wasn’t very good at this style of questioning. She asked a question Starmer had essentially already answered to the Liberal Democrat MP Christine Jardine a moment before she stood up, allowing him to echo a riposte from last week that she was “not listening”. In her penultimate question she brought in a case study – a tactic frequently employed by Starmer when he was leader of the opposition – asking how the Prime Minister would respond to Kelly, the owner of a small business providing after-school care, whose National Insurance bill was set to rise by 150 per cent.
The concern of small businesses going under is real, and had Badenoch started here she could have built on her theme. As it was, Starmer simply batted it away with his usual script about the Tory inheritance – and instead of returning to press him, the Tory leader moved on to deride the spectre (dismissed as “fantasy questions” made up by Starmer) of public sector employees working a four-day week. Badenoch’s natural confrontational style and her decision to leave Kelly’s plight near to the end implied this was an afterthought, with none of the emotional weight case studies usually provide, while her eagerness to switch topics reinforced the impression that she is more interested in finding culture war issues to scrap over than engaging with the real lives of voters.
Contrast this with the approach of the Liberal Democrats. At the very start of PMQs, Jardine set up the topic of the NI rise with a straightforward question on support for GP practices. Ed Davey then picked up the theme once Badenoch was finished, asking for a further commitment that GPs, pharmacies and other healthcare providers would be protected from the tax rise. His tone was mild, his question factual rather than aggressive. But it made Starmer more awkward than he had been at any point facing Badenoch. After the Prime Minister had answered, Davey said quietly: “I think patients and GPs listening to that will want more reassurance”. It was devastating.
Badenoch is still finding her feet with her new role and she clearly has the rhetorical skills to make a real impact at PMQs. But today she faltered. If she wants to land blows on Starmer, she might want to rewatch this session and identify how her provocations fell short.
[See also: Keir Starmer wants immigration control to be a Labour cause]
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