Badenoch is at her best tackling Mr Punch at PMQs
Labour MPs were sluggish with their cheers for the PM as he rose to answer questions this afternoon. Perhaps they’d forgotten what he looked like after all those trips abroad? They couldn’t forget what he sounds like, however. The adenoids cranked themselves into action, the sinuses flared, the mouth formed itself ready for each Dalek-like syllable.
“Fixing the Foundations”, “last government failed”, “£22 billion black hole”. The Starmbot began its usual barked repetition. If your radio behaved like this you’d presume it was on the blink. Has Lord Alli or Mandelson or whoever it is checked the fuses recently? All this shouty reheating of past hits was in response to a very calmly asked question by Kemi Badenoch about whether he’d back his Chancellor’s claim that taxes would not increase.
“He’s not fixing the foundations, he’s making everything worse,” said Mrs Badenoch, in the tone you might deploy with a toddler who has just lied about whether their nappy is full. “We are fixing foundations!” came the reply. It occurred to me that Sir Keir increasingly resembles Mr Punch: a red-faced, angry and villainous puppet who simply echoes catchphrases whenever challenged about his manifestly unreasonable behaviour. He also, as I recall, had an issue with sausages.
When Mrs Badenoch brought up the CBI’s criticism of the Budget, Mr Punch was reduced to spluttering incoherence – “Mr Speaker she, er, uh” – before launching into the Tories being inconsistent on National Insurance. The mention of the two million-signature petition to get Mr Punch to go and spend more time with his sausages also riled him. “We had a petition on the July 4,” he wailed – another tested trope, though Rachel Reeves did a little clap of glee when she heard it, like an orangutan being shown a mirror for the first time.
“What a load of nonsense, Mr Speaker,” Mrs Badenoch said, deploying that same “who’s done a whoopsie” voice. She was giving her best performance yet, clearly enjoying winding up Mr Punch into his axioms of frustration. She ended with a jibe at the Chancellor: given that everything is broken, isn’t it rather good that she was an expert in customer complaints? Mr Punch puffed himself up for a lecture: “She comes here every week with nothing to offer.” Which is quite a bold line of attack from a man who repeats his stock phrases so often that you wonder if he might be concussed.
Stephen Flynn asked the PM whether he was aware – in National Scams Awareness Week – of any plans to rob pensioners this winter or raise energy bills. The Starmbot laughed this off, presumably because it came from a man. Or perhaps they’d found his “humanity” reboot button. Tahir Ali, the Labour MP, made a call for what sounded very much like a blasphemy law. Living history exhibit Ian Lavery tried to relitigate the miner’s strike. All of these got sympathy from Mr Punch.
When, however, Rupert Lowe of Reform asked when he might get an answer about the number of illegal immigrants receiving universal credit, he was simply assured that an update would be forthcoming. At least in Mr Punch’s case, the other one really does have bells on.