OPINION
Kemi Badenoch badly needs to improve PMQs tactics to be back in business (Image: Carl Court/Getty Images)
“Come back!” hollered some wag across the House as Rishi Sunak got to his feet during Prime Minister’s Questions. And you know if they’re calling for the damp squib’s return things must be really bad.
Kemi, Kemi, Kemi… where is it all going wrong!? You were supposed to be the waspish, quick-witted, acerbic commentator, with a lightning appreciation of the facts and an iron-clad, downhome common sense.
But right now your performances in PMQs are making look quite the witty, super-confident raconteur – a positive political Graham Norton.
And he’s not – he’s a plodding lawyer with all the charm and warmth of a wet dishcloth.
His Majesty’s Opposition should approach PMQs like a sniper with the PM in the cross hairs. Heavily armed with the right weapons but ready to recalibrate the sight at a moment’s notice.
Kemi took a water pistol, and didn’t change her aim once.
If you’ll excuse one last tortuous military metaphor, she then proceeded to walk into a minefield of her own making.
Kemi chose to try and pull up Starmer over details of his decision to raise defence spending and pay for it by scrapping big chunks of the overseas aid budget.
As this has basically been the dream scenario of most right-thinking (and most Brits I’ll be bound) for years, how did she ever think she was going to pull him apart on that one?
And so she asked a fairly plodding question about whether the cost was going to be £31.4bn or – as the Defence Secretary said this morning – £6bn.
And clearly we do need to know. But she blew it by trying to ham-fistedly claim some of the credit.
“Over the weekend,” she said, “I suggested he cut the aid budget and I am pleased he accepted my advice.”
I have rarely seen the PM get to his feet quite so quickly as he replied: “I am going to have to let the Leader of the Opposition down gently… she did not figure in my thinking at all. I was so busy over the weekend I didn’t even see her proposal.
“I think she has appointed herself the saviour of western civilisation in a desperate search for relevance.”
, the very definition of wooden performer at the despatch box, had just managed to sound witty, sharp and every inch the serious diplomat attending to vital affairs of state while dismissing the Tory leader as an irrelevance.
Kemi, and her people, are going to have to get to grips with her PMQs performance if this shattered and riven Tory party is ever to get back on its feet.
In truth there were only two periods where Sir Keir looked unsteady. First when Diane Abbot, a woman who can barely disguise her contempt for her party leader, asked: “There is the view that taking money from aid and development to spend on armaments and tanks makes people less safe not more safe.”
And this is the grass-roots party take on the aid budget squeeze I suspect. But these are crazy dangerous times and Starmer easily batted it away citing the safety of the nation.
The only time his cohones were really being squeezed was over his relationship with Trump.
Don’t miss…
That, Tory Central Office, was Starmer’s Achilles heel today.
And weirdly it took a mild-mannered Ed Davey to bring the heat.
“We won’t be able to rely on President Trump to help ensure our security against Russian aggression,” he said, suggesting pivoting to a Euro-Army would be necessary.
Oh no, no,no, blustered Sir Keir – hours away from a showdown with the US President in Washington – we can absolutely rely on the US (we can’t) and there is still a special relationship (there isn’t).
That was how to get the PM on the backfoot, and it’s shocking none of those advising Badenoch could see that.
Elsewhere this was a PMQs spectacularly short on laughs.
For my money one of the major points of concern seemed to be that the price of single malts might be going up due to some red-tape reclassification or other.
But the details were relayed in such a somnambulant way by Graham Leadbitter ( Moray West, Nairn, and Strathspey) I can’t be 100 percent sure.
Still, food for thought. Even this might have been a better target for the .
In a PMQs wash-down on Sky TV this afternoon Tory MP for Exmouth and Exeter East David Reed said of Kemi’s defence figures question “That’s what the public wants to know at the moment.”
Me I reckon the realpolitik of life might suggest what the public really want to know is whether their favourite scotch may (or may not) be going up a few quid.
But, as ever, I’ll let you be the judge.