At this point in the electoral cycle, prime minister’s questions tends to turn into one of those unadvertised experimental “new material” gigs that stand up comics sometimes do before a major tour. Try a few things out, see what hits, see what misses. And on this particular occasion, we must hope that both men will have been wise enough to have gone away and crossed a very thick line through all of it.
You have to hope that Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer know something’s gone a bit wrong when they’re shouting over the dispatch boxes at one another and the main thing they are arguing about is who kicks racists out of their party the fastest.
In even faintly normal times, having to suspend the whip from someone — in this case Lee Anderson — for making execrable comments about Sadiq Khan would not be something for a prime minister to brag about. But here he was, up on the balls of his feet, jabbing his finger in Starmer’s direction, jutting his head forward with the kind of force rarely seen outside the video for Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles, and taking great pride in the fact that he had suspended Anderson “straight away”.
If you want to obsess over the details, it wasn’t quite straight away — it actually took him a full 24 hours. But when the Labour candidate for Rochdale, on the other hand, had been recorded repeating ridiculous antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Hamas terror attacks, Starmer didn’t suspend him for two days, not one, and that’s the real quiz.
The Tory benches went bananas at this. It was, as far as they’re concerned, a knockout punch. It was, generally speaking, a very noisy session. In previous weeks, the Speaker would certainly have intervened, but things have changed for Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who sat quietly in his chair, seeming to hope that no one would notice he was there.
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It was an almost-PTSD inducing throwback to the Theresa May/Jeremy Corbyn years, most of which eventually descended to rows about which was worse, your antisemitism or my Islamophobia, but Starmer, not entirely to his credit, has now refreshed the playlist.
Most of his questions were about Liz Truss’s fully unhinged US book tour, where she accused the “deep state” and the “communists” and “socialists” who control it of destroying her premiership (not for the first time, we must point out that it wasn’t the deep state, it was those well-known communists, the bond markets).
Starmer sensed an opportunity here. He even dared Sunak to kick Truss out of the party. Starmer knows he’s going to spend the rest of this year being portrayed, not entirely unfairly, as a Corbyn-enabler, leading a party that can’t be trusted because look at the leader before this one.
Over at Labour HQ, Truss deliberately rebranding herself as every bit as dangerous as Corbyn must have felt like a gift from the gods, but on this evidence it’s not going to work out that way.
Sunak gets very little credit for spending the summer of 2022 telling his party exactly what would happen if they voted for Truss, all of which he was right about but they didn’t listen. Starmer, meanwhile, turned on Corbyn in hindsight, not foresight, which is several orders of magnitude easier.
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It was worth a try, but no. Best find some new material.
