The Tories have finally found their firebrand
Over recent weeks, Keir Starmer became accustomed to the kid gloves treatment from outgoing Tory leader Rishi Sunak at PMQs.
Last week’s encounter between the pair was little more than a mutual admiration session, though afterwards Sunak did at least find sufficient fire in his belly to give Rachel Reeves a tough time over the Budget.
After today’s first tussle with Kemi Badenoch, the Prime Minister will know that the interlude of softly-spoken politeness is well and truly over. Boos will once more be said to geese, horses will be frightened afresh and the parliamentary hen house will cluck with alarm.
Badenoch’s debut was memorably combative and full of jibes about Starmer’s alleged inability to ad-lib and the penchant of his top team for “student politics”.
Resplendent in the most Tory blue imaginable, Mrs Badenoch did not try to be too clever by half, but instead had spotted an open goal and promptly scored it. She put on the parliamentary record Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s outrageously insulting past assessments of Donald Trump and challenged Starmer to issue an apology for them.
There then followed a crack about Labour having sent its “north London activists” over to campaign for Kamala Harris and a request for the PM to ask the Speaker to invite the victorious Trump to address parliament on his next visit to the UK. This was basic stuff done well – see a bruise and just keep punching it.
Fortunately for Starmer, he did not fall into the trap of congratulating Badenoch on her own recent election victory on tokenistic grounds – “first black woman” etc – as he had done in a media statement over the weekend. She’d have had his guts for garters had he done that.
While Badenoch introduced herself with aplomb, she did not quite win the exchanges by a knockout blow because Starmer actually managed to make a joke all of his own and it wasn’t terrible. He noted that if she was going to accuse him of sticking to pre-scripted lines, it would have been better for her not to have read that allegation out from her own script. By Starmer standards that was an absolute zinger, even causing him to laugh spontaneously at his own wit.
But the overall change in the terms of trade was apparent and are not to his advantage. This Government averages much more than one terrible mistake per week and thus Badenoch is never going to be short of material with which to berate it in the Commons.
She will get more brutal yet, and one day fairly soon he will emerge dazed and confused from their exchanges. The Tories are back in business.