Nigel Farage was laughing. For a few moments he was the centre of attention, and showed how an Opposition leader can benefit from a Government attack.
John Slinger (Lab, Rugby) had served up an easy question for Sir Keir Starmer, observing that Farage was “open to an insurance-based system” for the NHS, and inviting the Prime Minister to reassure people that they will not have to worry about paying for medical treatment.
Starmer replied in his pious way that “the NHS is the lifeblood of our country”, and the Government has given it an extra £25 billion, whereas “the Leader of Reform”, i.e. Farage, “has said those who can afford to pay should pay”.
To some of us, that sounds a perfectly reasonable idea, if a practical way can be found to arrange it, but Starmer declared that under Labour the NHS “will always be free at the point of use for anyone who needs it”.
When Farage was called, he began by saying that “Reform want health care to be free at the point of use”. The Labour benches protested. “They really are panicking, aren’t they?” Farage said, and laughed in his best saloon-bar manner, designed to suggest that everyone in the saloon bar is just as amused as he is by whatever witty attack he has just made on the powers that be.
Farage went on to ask what he should say to 25,000 pensioners in his constituency, including a 99-year-old who flew a full set of missions in a Lancaster bomber as a tail-end Charlie, who are losing their Winter Fuel Allowance at the same time as the Government are “prepared to give away a military base and pay £18 billion for the privilege of doing it”.
Starmer said he should tell the people of Clacton, “when he finally finds Clacton”, that “they should vote Labour because we’re stabilising the economy and boosting growth”.
Somehow this did not sound a very inspiring message for the people of Clacton. If the country wants a saloon-bar orator, Farage had yet again shown he is the best one available, and Starmer by singling him out for attack had implied that Labour is indeed worried by Reform.
Kemi Badenoch had earlier made the strange decision to include both the Chagos Islands and North Sea oil and gas in her opening question.
Starmer had come prepared with a yet stranger defence. He said there are perfectly good, but unmentionable, reasons for the Chagos decision, and these had led the previous Government to start the negotiations leading to it: “They were right to do so.”
Starmer says the last Government got something right! An extraordinary moment. He accused Badenoch of knowing these weighty but secret reasons, or else of being culpably ignorant, for she had not taken up his offer of a security briefing about them.
Badenoch failed to respond to this bizarre defence. Starmer had suggested, as he often does, that only the grown-ups, of whom he is the leader, can be trusted with the reasons for what the Government is doing. Here is an excuse for keeping Parliament and the people in the dark which cannot be allowed to stand.
“I am speaking on behalf of the people of this country,” Badenoch said at one point, as she pursued her line of prepared questions about the North Sea and the nefarious influence of Labour donors who pay for legal challenges to its exploitation.
The people of this country are incredulous that we should give away the Chagos Islands and pay for the privilege of doing so. This was a point which Farage, who from time to time is allowed a single question, made better than the Leader of the Opposition in her usual six-question allowance.
