Keir Starmer failed the noise test at Prime Minister’s Questions today. In the press gallery, much of his answer to Kemi Badenoch’s sixth and final question was inaudible.
Normally, this wouldn’t matter, because the microphones pick up what is said in the Commons and anyone watching on TV would have heard him perfectly clearly. But the noise matters to MPs in the chamber. Labour MPs were aware that their colleagues around them were mostly sitting in glum silence. Conservative MPs knew that their leader had skewered Starmer with each question, and were surprised and pleased that their shouts of derision were drowning out a prime minister mumbling his way through his prepared answers.
To be precise, this particular noise mattered because there are not many Tory MPs – the fewest in any parliament in the party’s history. The Tories have not been used to being able to shout down their opponents since last year’s election drubbing. They have been used to thinking that Badenoch missed the mark again. They have been used to thinking that they made the wrong decision when they elected her, and wondering how long they have to leave it before the party no longer looks ridiculous if it tries to change leader yet again.
Not today. Today, they saw Badenoch at her fiery, articulate and focused best. Admittedly, Peter Mandelson had provided her with some rich material, admitting to maintaining his contact with disgraced paedophile Jeffrey Epstein for “far longer than I should have done” and saying that he expected more “embarrassing” details of their friendship to emerge in the coming weeks.
But on the evidence of recent outings, Badenoch might have been expected to waste an opportunity such as this. Indeed, the Tory leader seemed set to disappoint when she started her first question by talking about the Russian attack on Poland and Ukraine. Never mind World War Three breaking out on Europe’s doorstep, there did not seem to be much partisan advantage in that line of questioning, until Badenoch neatly turned it into a question about our influence with the Trump administration and therefore the future of the British ambassador to Washington.
Starmer read out a deliberately flat answer: “victims”, “deep regret”, “confidence”, “important role”. When Badenoch asked what he knew when Mandelson was appointed, Starmer read out the human resources brief about “full due process” being followed. She snapped back: “I wasn’t asking a question about process. I was asking a question about his judgement.”
By the fifth question, Starmer was struggling to be heard. He had a change of subject written down in front of him, so he read that out: “I think she is finally catching up with the questions that she should have asked last week about the deputy prime minister.” This was a curious defence, saying in effect, “I really would have been in trouble last week if you had pressed harder on Angela Rayner’s future.”
Except that she had asked last week why Rayner was still in post – and two days later she was gone. Was the same going to happen to Mandelson?
Starmer tried to list all the things the government has been doing this week, to show how it was getting on with the job and not being distracted. Unfortunately, the list was: “a new schools-based nursery”, a “reopened Doncaster Sheffield airport” and a plan to repair “the concrete in our hospitals”.
To Tory delight, Badenoch briskly dismissed all this as “a load of waffle and whataboutery”. Labour MPs could only silently agree.
For once, her peroration hit home. She said all Labour was interested in was a “pointless deputy leadership election”; the prime minister has an ambassador “mired in scandal”; he lost his deputy prime minister in a tax mess; he has a new foreign secretary “learning the ropes” and not able to help with crises abroad; and strikes were crippling London because he won’t “face down the unions”. She asked: “Isn’t the link between all of these his bad decisions, his bad judgement, and his total weakness?”
Starmer had one half-decent riposte saved up. Labour’s deputy leadership election comes to an end on 25 October, he said. “Their leadership contest has been going on for months.” The rest of his final answer was, as I say, lost in the chamber.
It fell flat because this was a week when, unusually, Tory MPs would not be leaving the chamber muttering about a change of leader. This was a week when they would be saying that Badenoch had really let Starmer have it.
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