Condescending Keir blows up his own image as an equal opportunity patroniser

Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister
PMQs was another outing for Sir Keir’s petulant child act - House of Commons

The first question at PMQs on Wednesday came from Christine Jardine, fresh from being reassembled by an expert team of road safety specialists after her car-crash interview with Victoria Derbyshire. Rather than accidentally admitting that the safeguards of the assisted suicide Bill aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, this time she was talking about GP practices affected by the National Insurance rise. Leaving aside Ms Jardine’s astonishing gift for breezily ignoring the concerns of the medical profession one minute only to act as their advocate the next, it was a good question.

Sir Keir Starmer launched into one of his interminable sermons about the tough decisions he’d had to take. Cue groans. The desperation was palpable in the next question, from an egg-headed careerist who popped up from the back benches to attempt the world’s geekiest character assassination of Kemi Badenoch. This bottom-crawling non-entity listed all the horrible and mean things she was alleged to support.

Kemi batted off the bottom-crawler like he was a fly: “The Prime Minister can plant as many questions as he likes, he still has to answer me.” As Mrs Badenoch began her questions – on tax, on energy, on councils – Sir Keir huffed like a fleshy low-watt kettle: “Not listening to what I said three minutes ago is a bit of a fundamental failure of the Leader of the Opposition.”

Every woman will know the feeling of blood slowly beginning to boil as some patronising twerp gets on his high horse and begins what he believes to be an edifying lecture. Thinking himself the Henry Higgins of Old St Pancras, the PM ratcheted up the condescension stakes again and again, speaking to Mrs Badenoch with barely concealed contempt.

Now, I’m sure Sir Keir thinks of himself as an equal opportunity patroniser, condescending to men and women alike but, in reality, his particular issue with women – identified by his own former MP Rosie Duffield – really comes out in moments like this, when he’s answering questions he thinks are beneath him. Which, it seems, is all of them. He’s slowly metamorphosing into Michael Winner: plump, patronising, proffering a rage-inducing “calm down, dear”.

The current crop of Labour MPs are normally pretty toady – let’s just say picking one up would probably give you warts for a week. However, today they really excelled themselves. The green benches temporarily transformed into the amphibian tank at London Zoo. There were bottom-sniffing non-questions from new MPs Sojan Joseph, Catherine Fookes, Antonia Bance and Jo White; the PM growing more brazen with each one. “We haven’t touched National Insurance,” he lied through his nose, having just whacked up employers’ NI by £25 billion.

After stumbling over her opening sallies, Badenoch was more effective on the real-world consequences of the NI hike. Alas, each tricky question received the same blather from the Starmbot – variations on “14 years!”, “fixing the foundations”, “our economic inheritance” or “£22bn black hole!”. Not that Badenoch was the only victim. New MP Lincoln Jopp planted a grenade of a question about Sue Gray’s abortive role as Starmer’s “special envoy to the nations”. Would the PM admit that this was “an invented job for one of his cronies”, Jopp asked. “If it wasn’t, is he going to hire a new one?”

Here we had another outing for the PM’s petulant child act; where, when confronted with a perfectly reasonable question, he simply pops up with a few monosyllables (in this case, a terse “no, it wasn’t”) before plonking himself back down again. Up in the gallery the Speaker of the Somali House of the People, whom Lindsay Hoyle had made great fanfare of welcoming earlier, quietly and sensibly slipped away, the level of debate clearly beneath him.