In her first outing at PMQs Kemi Badenoch was relaxed, amused, disrespectful, light on her feet, full of fighting spirit and landed several painful jabs on Sir Keir Starmer without knocking him out.
The Prime Minister jabbed back, but mostly he took refuge in repetition. His favourite phrase this week, often used by builders who have made a great mess but no visible progress, was “we are fixing the foundations”.
When Badenoch accused him of delivering “scripted lines”, he retorted that “if she’s going to complain about scripted answers, probably best not to read that”.
Starmer needs a script. So do most of his backbenchers. Badenoch does not, and should speak in future without notes.
She began by asking Starmer if he stood by the “derogatory and scatological” remarks made by David Lammy, now Foreign Secretary, about Donald Trump, now President Elect.
Starmer said they recently had dinner with Trump. One wondered if he was going to give us the menu, but he contented himself with the claim that it was “a very constructive exercise”.
Several Labour backbenchers were primed to ask Starmer about supposed gaffes made by Badenoch on questions like maternity pay and partygate.
The Westminster lobby is never happier than when running after a gaffe, but the effect of these questions was to make Badenoch the beginner sound significant enough to worry the ruling class.
She accused the Chancellor of the Exchequer of not mentioning defence in the Budget. This statement was not correct, so could at once be pounced on as a gaffe, or at least an inaccuracy.
But her general contention that Labour is not taking defence seriously got through.
And one may note that the American press constantly accused Trump of making gaffes, which made him the centre of attention, highlighted subjects he wanted to talk about, and did not, to put it mildly, have the effect of turning him into a loser.
Badenoch is no Trump, but could benefit from a similar dynamic, pedantic claims about her inaccuracies helping to make her the centre of attention, profiling her as someone happy to talk about topics which would be regarded as impolite at a North London dinner party.
It is possible that Starmer, in the course of several years, will gain credit for sticking in a dull way to his guns, and that the vast army of Labour backbenchers will gain credit for sticking in a dull way to Starmer, who will enable them in four years’ time to hold their seats.
But Badenoch on this first outing communicated a sovereign contempt for her ponderous opponent which is already shared in the Dog and Duck.
