The Labour Whips have sent a message to all backbenchers: Kemi Badenoch must be destroyed, and any Labour MP whose name is on the Order Paper for PMQs must ask about the supposedly intolerable opinions of the Leader of the Opposition.
If this continues, the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, will at some point rule that the Prime Minister is there to answer for the Government rather than the Opposition.
But while these attempts to sink Badenoch continue, their chief effect is to indicate that Labour regards her as a serious threat.
And there she was, looking both buoyant and threatening. “The Prime Minister can plant as many questions as he likes,” she said with a smile, “but at the end of the day I’m the one he has to face at the Despatch Box.”
She welcomed him back from his trip to Azerbaijan, but said he had made “unilateral commitments” there which will make life more expensive, and wondered: “Will the Prime Minister confirm that he will keep the cap on council tax?”
“I’m very proud of the fact that we’re restoring leadership on climate to this country,” Starmer replied in a pious tone, “that will be measured in lower bills.”
Virtue will make us better off, he insisted, an encouraging doctrine for anyone whose instinct is to hold the moral high ground, and “on the question of councils she knows what the arrangements are”.
Badenoch wondered how much more money he expects local authorities will have to raise to cover the social care funding gap created by the Chancellor’s Budget and increases in employers’ National Insurance?
Starmer replied with a superior smile, “It’s all very well this knockabout, but not actually listening to what I said three minutes ago is a bit of a fundamental failure of the Leader of the Opposition.”
The Prime Minister had told Christine Jardine (Lib Dem, Edinburgh West) – who had said GPs in her constituency are worried increased NI contributions will diminish the quality of care they can offer – that the Government will provide “£600 million to deal with the pressures of adult social care”.
He now repeated the £600 million pound figure, as if it answered Badenoch’s question of how much more local authorities will have to raise.
She retorted that the Labour-run Local Government Association does not believe the £600 million will be enough and accused the Prime Minister and Chancellor of not thinking through the consequences of the Budget: “Do they not realise that care homes, GP surgeries, childrens’ nurseries, hospices and even charities have to pay employers’ NI?”
Badenoch claimed the Government’s own figures show a £2.4 billion pound black hole in social care, a lot more than £600 million, but suggested the PM has been away so has not been told what is going on.
Starmer naturally insisted, and seems indeed to believe, he is on top of all this. Badenoch said “he has nothing to offer except platitudes” and accused the Government of seeking to “milk the private sector and hope nobody noticed”.
The PM’s self-belief saw him through these exchanges, but when Sir Ed Davey, Leader of the Lib Dems, asked about access to GPs, Starmer found it expedient to adopt a more conciliatory tone: “I hear the point he makes.”
The PM does not wish to find himself fighting a war on two fronts, against the Lib Dems as well as the Conservatives. We shall see whether he can avoid one.
