Prime minister’s questions this afternoon did not display the same combative grit that we have grown accustomed to across recent sessions. Kemi Badenoch’s questions were more consciously consensual than previous lines of inquiry; at one point, she even attempted a pleasantry. Meanwhile, her lines of attack — when she did pursue them — were limper. Keir Starmer took full advantage.
The novel approach, notwithstanding any lessons learnt from recent maladroit performances, recognises that in the grand scheme of the next 48 hours — the most crucial of Starmer’s premiership so far — this relatively tedious tussle with the Tory leader will not register.
The prime minister will have travelled straight from the chamber to the plane that will carry him to Washington DC — and to Donald Trump. Badenoch began by wishing the prime minister “every success” in his conversations with the US president. She said the visit “must serve our national interest” and asked what specific steps the Starmer will take to ensure Ukraine is involved in peace talks.
The prime minister thanked Badenoch for her support and restated his position that Ukraine “must be at the table” for peace talks on its future.
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Starmer, in a shock move on Tuesday, sought to strengthen his hand in his conversations with Trump by announcing a plan to ratchet defence spending toward 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027. Badenoch claimed credit for policy, particularly the idea to raid the foreign aid budget for funds. Referencing a letter she penned over the weekend, the Conservative leader insisted she was “pleased” the prime minister had taken her advice. But she pressed Starmer on the government’s claim that defence spending will rise by £13.4 billion in 2027 — when the real terms, inflation-adjusted figure is more like £6 billion.
“Which is the correct figure?”, Badenoch asked.
Starmer roundly and ruthlessly dismissed the Conservative leader’s claim to the mantle of thought leadership. “She didn’t feature in my thinking at all”, he insisted. “I was so busy at the weekend — I didn’t see her proposal.”
The comment stands as a parliamentary variant of the Jon Hamm elevator meme. “I don’t think about you at all”, Starmer in effect declared. It was fantastically savage. The prime minister added: “She’s appointed herself, I think saviour of the western civilisation.
“It’s a desperate search for relevance.”
There was a compelling synergy to the attacks. Starmer’s comments pointed to a single conclusion: the Tory leader’s interventions are immaterial.
Badenoch’s claim that the Conservative Party, with her at the vanguard, is the UK’s foremost civilisational bulwark — the frontier legion defending Britain’s political order from encroaching barbarians — won short shrift from the prime minister. Her speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship “ARC” conference last week is, after all, ripe for ridicule in settings such as this.
The exchange is a reminder that Badenoch’s performances at radical right institutes and conservative “movements” are not divorced from the wider political landscape. The echoes can and will escape their original chamber. It is no surprise that Labour strategists have picked through her commentary — delivered to an audience of mostly American MAGA acolytes — and landed on the soundbite that casts her in the least forgiving light.
The Conservative leader cannot suddenly shrink from her ideological maximalism once she arrives in the commons chamber. She is on the record and therefore on the hook. Badenoch’s ARC speech provided ample ammunition for Starmer to discharge at the despatch box.
And Starmer did offer an answer to the Conservative leader’s inquiry. “If you take the numbers for this financial year and then the numbers for the financial year 27/28, that is £13.4 billion increase”, he asserted.
“That is the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War, which will put us in a position to ensure the security and defence of our country and of Europe.”
But Badenoch was not content. “That wasn’t very clear”, she reflected, reiterating her claim there is an inconsistency in the proposed defence spending numbers. “How is it that the defence secretary says £6 billion and he says £13.4 billion?”, she asked again.
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The prime minister jumped at the opportunity to deploy the same tactic that so definitively dispatched Badenoch last session: “We went through this two weeks ago, going through the same question over and over again”.
He repeated his previous answer, with added emphasis on every syllable. “If you take the financial year this year and then you take the financial year for 2027/28, the difference between the two is £13.4 billion. That is the same answer.
“If you ask again I will give the same answer again.”
Badenoch labelled the prime minister’s comeback “patronising”. Such a tone, she insisted, is no “substitute for answering questions”.
“He hasn’t answered. What he has said is different from what he said yesterday. We are still not clear where the money is coming from.”
It is a doomed, deeply politically misguided tactic. At this point, it was clear that the Conservative leader had received her answer on defence spending — or the best answer she could reasonably hope for. From here, Badenoch could have chosen to make an argument about how Starmer’s sophistry speaks to a lack of seriousness when it comes to the defence of the realm. But by repeating the same question, Badenoch appeared leaden — unable to think on her feet and roll with Starmer’s punches.
Badenoch’s call for clarity about the scale of the increase in defence spending is also belied by the fact that there is, in the end, no real confusion. It is no surprise that the government has decided to parade the cash-terms figure — in the same way that Badenoch’s apparent criticism, that this figure accounts for spending that would have happened anyway, is politically explicable.
There is no grand conspiracy at hand. The prime minister provided an acceptable — by PMQs standards — answer to Badenoch’s question. In the same vein as last session therefore, the Conservative leader was left carping from the sidelines about some politically moot detail.
Scrutinising fiscal sleight-of-hand is the job of the IFS, not LOTO. Badenoch failed to put forward a political case. Her angle was that the numbers do not stack up; Starmer’s argument is that the Conservative leader does not do her homework, which leaves her looking foolish when someone — her PMQs opponent to be specific — does. It’s easy to see which narrative fares better, and why.
Badenoch’s determination to script the same question without the slightest cognisance of the prime minister’s probable answer — and torture it beyond all political reason — is simply a recipe for irrelevance.
All that said, this was a slightly better PMQs for Kemi Badenoch than recent precedent. Last session, the Conservative leader’s reliance on Telegraph and Daily Mail headlines left her humiliated. The prime minister highlighted basic inaccuracies. The facts, it turned out, reflected poorly on the record of the last government in which Badenoch served.
The parliamentary recess that followed ensured Conservative MPs left the commons for their constituencies with a bitter taste in their mouth. A fresh wave of Badenoch-sceptic briefing followed.
The prime minister’s trip to Washington, of course, will lighten any Conservative post-PMQs hangover. But there is still no disguising that Badenoch is poor at this.
If the Tory leader really is the last custodian of civilisation, the evidence of her PMQs performances suggests we are doomed.
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