Kemi Badenoch had an opportunity at PMQs today. The defence spending uplift announced by Keir Starmer yesterday is something the opposition has long called for – but it is causing consternation on the government’s own backbenches because the funding has been redirected from international aid. Would the Tory leader punch the bruise by highlighting the rifts within Labour, goading the Prime Minister to further antagonise MPs dismayed by Britain’s retreat from its global development agenda?
In a word, no. Instead Badenoch went for the twin tactics of claiming credit for the government’s decision, while reheating her attempt from a fortnight ago, during the previous PMQs, to stick with the same question and accuse Keir Starmer of not having answered it. It did not work then, and it did not work today.
Badenoch had in her crosshairs the government’s number-fudging on the defence announcement: how the much-heralded additional £13.4bn could be conjured up from a £6bn cut in international aid. It’s valid to point out the fiscal sleight-of-hand (as the New Statesman’s business editor Will Dunn explains here). The trouble was that Starmer gave a pretty comprehensive answer the first time Badenoch asked him about this, leaving her nowhere to go. As with her previous PMQs session, she persevered nonetheless. And as at the last session, Starmer seized on the chance to make her look ridiculous. “We went thought this two weeks ago of going through the same question again and again,” he mocked her. “If you ask again, I’ll give the same answer again.” There were howls of laughter in the House. Badenoch fumed. Her Conservative colleagues looked awkward and embarrassed.
If anything, the Tory leader’s bid to claim credit for the defence announcement went even worse. She noted she had advised Starmer over the weekend to raid the international aid budget for the money, and smugly told the House: “I am pleased that he has accepted my advice.” This was another of those moments where it seemed like Badenoch and her team felt they had come up with a killer line, without wondering if the PM might also have prepared.
The aid-to-defence suggestion has been floated by figures on the right before (it was in the Reform manifesto, for a start). Of course Starmer was ready. “I’m going to have to let the leader of the opposition down gently; she didn’t feature in my thinking at all,” he replied, in the tone of a teacher deflating the delusions of an over-imaginative pupil.
For good measure, Starmer threw in a line about Badenoch’s bizarre speech last week at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference: “She’s appointed herself saviour of Western civilisation. It’s a desperate search for relevance.” This time, the laughter came not just from the Labour benches, but from quite a few Conservative MPs sitting behind Badenoch. He also flagged her “rambling speech yesterday” – Badenoch’s first big foreign policy set piece, which lacked coherence and failed to make any kind of news impact at all (even in right-leaning media outlets).
Badenoch fell back to playing the victim: “Being patronising is not a substitute for answering questions,” she protested. Starmer was taking a patronising tone with her, but he was able to do so because she has consistently demonstrated how she is under-prepared and unable to adjust attack lines when her scripted plan goes awry. As Badenoch has failed to improve (and whispers from her colleagues about her poor performances grow louder), Starmer has become more confident in toying with her and laying bare her weaknesses to the benches opposite. It’s not kind (but then, PMQs never is).
The only dicey moment was, yet again, the Chagos Islands. Badenoch wanted confirmation that none of the defence spending announced this week would go to Mauritius as part of the handover deal (which, it is rumoured, would involve Britain paying up to £18bn to lease territory it has just surrendered for the sake of a UK-US airbase). Starmer couldn’t give it. “The additional spend I announced yesterday is for our capability on defence and security in Europe. As I made absolutely clear yesterday, the Chagos deal is extremely important for our security,” he replied. That sounds an awful lot like the government wants the option of claiming that the security implications of the Chagos deal fall under the defence umbrella. Later in the PMQs session, the Tory MP Kieran Mullan asked the same yes-or-no question about the Chagos Islands, and was given the same non-committal answer. Watch this space.
This should have been a tricky week for Starmer, even with the House united in hoping his trip to see Donald Trump tomorrow goes as well as it possibly can. As it was, Badenoch looked irrelevant. The toughest question for the PM came from the Labour left’s needler-in-chief Diane Abbott, who highlighted the sense of betrayal many backbenchers feel about the aid being slashed to pay for defence, and made Starmer visibly flinch. It’s not the first time Badenoch has been made to look like the warm-up act at PMQs. The Prime Minister faces huge challenges, but the leader of the opposition is not currently one of them.
[See also: Keir Starmer in Trumpworld]
Content from our partners
