PMQs, haunted by the political ghost of David Cameron

David Cameron’s post-prime ministerial career, it is fair to say, probably hasn’t lived up to his expectations.

First he tried to make a few quid in the banking world, to keep up with his Chipping Norton neighbours who went straight into hedge fund management from university. That ended in ignominy as it emerged Cameron been texting the then chancellor to secure his new employer access to a financing facility scheme during the Covid crisis.

Then, when that chancellor, Rishi Sunak, became prime minister, Cameron accepted the position as foreign secretary having apparently secured a promise from the PM he’d go the full term and not do anything rash, like call a snap election at an entirely unnecessary time in the pouring rain, forcing Cameron to head back to the UK from a planned trip to Albania where the capital was already festooned with posters of his face.

Cameron is now said to be coaching Kemi Badenoch for prime minister’s questions, a task for which she is currently showing about as much ability as Elon Musk leading a two-week silent retreat. He does pick them, doesn’t he?

To be fair to Tory leader Badenoch, she was on a hiding to nothing today given the only show in town is the announcement of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and no one, not least the US president himself, knows what they will entail. So she did what she does every week and laid into Rachel Reeves’s budget, which calendar fans will know was now fully five months ago.

“The only mess is the one that the prime minister made with his budget,” said Badenoch. “They had an emergency budget last week that fixed nothing. He says that he is bringing stability, but all we see is fragility.” (It wasn’t an emergency budget, it was the spring statement, a tradition going back to 2016, but, to be fair, these things are messed around with so much she can be forgiven for not keeping up.)

“The right honourable lady’s fantasy figure is about as much use as Liz Truss’s economic planning,” said Keir Starmer, who is not immune himself to digging up the past. “She turns up every week to carp from the sidelines about decisions that we made in the budget. Yesterday, she held a press conference and could not say whether she would reverse the decisions that we made at the budget.”

This, in essence, is Badenoch’s problem. Every week she turns up at PMQs and attacks the hike in national insurance payments, but at every opportunity she declines to say whether she would reverse it or not as, presumably, she doesn’t know. What would Cameron’s advice be on getting out of such a conundrum? Something about going to Eton and learning properly how a chap bullshits himself out of such things, probably.

Eventually, Badenoch did turn to the looming tariffs and where Starmer had failed. “In November, I urged him to seize the draft US trade deal that the Conservatives negotiated,” she said. “It is no wonder he cannot get a tariff deal for British cars.”

The key reason, of course, that the government did not seize the draft US deal is that no such thing has ever existed outside the more fervent fantasies of the Brexiteers, but Starmer was slightly more delicate, what with this thing going out live on C-SPAN in the US. “We are working with all sectors that are likely to be impacted, and we are guided by our national interest at all times, and that is why we have said we will not rule anything out, but it is important at a moment like this that we do not have knee-jerk reactions and that we are cool-headed about this,” he said. That is his line, and it will remain so for as long as it remains tenable, i.e. until about 9.01pm tonight.

Still, at least Badenoch managed not to win this week’s hyperbole award. That went to Ayoub Khan, one of the ragtag bunch of independents, who represents the beleaguered Birmingham Perry Barr, where council refuse collectors are currently on strike.

“After more than a decade of Labour control, that council’s incompetence has led to mountains of uncollected rubbish piling up on every street, so large that they can be seen by satellites orbiting in space,” he claimed. Is this really true? Because an awful lot of those satellites are owned by the man effectively second-in-command to the one about to impose whopping tariffs on us, and your correspondent wouldn’t trust either of them.