PMQs Review: Kemi Badenoch's opportunism is shameless

The child grooming scandal, said Kemi Badenoch as she eyeballed Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions, was “one of the worst scandals in British history”. It was no small claim, and one that immediately put the accident-prone Tory leader on the defensive.

Surely if what she said was true – and your correspondent is not seeking to downplay the horror of the events here – one would think Badenoch would have mentioned it in the House of Commons at least once in all the years she has spent as an MP – including two in which she served as a minister who you might have expected to have issues like this foremost in her thoughts. Otherwise, one might think, she was dealing in shameless opportunism around an issue of unspeakable disgust.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

“The leader of the opposition has been a Member of Parliament for, I think, eight years, and her party were in government for seven-and-a half of those eight years,” Starmer replied. “She was the children’s minister. She was the women and equalities minister. I cannot recall her once raising this issue in the House, or once calling for a national inquiry. It is only in recent days that she has jumped on the bandwagon.

“In fairness, if I am wrong about that and she has raised it, I invite her to say so now, and I will happily withdraw the remark that she has not raised it in the House in the eight years she has been here, until today.”

Of course, Badenoch could not force the prime minister to withdraw it, for, as even the most cursory search of Hansard would reveal, she had not mentioned it in the Commons once before this edition of PMQs. “I have raised it in speeches, and I have raised it publicly,” she snapped back, in what is already a challenger for vaguest Commons statement of the year. It was a bit like claiming to have hit a nine-darter, but on the board in your shed.

It all felt quite similar to how her colleague/deadly rival Robert Jenrick is attempting to reinvent himself as the doughtiest of advocates for the victims having tragically never having found the time to raise the scandal, or speak about it, or possibly even think about it until a rich insomniac posted about it on social media last week.

Albeit a hors d’oeuvre to the second reading of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill this afternoon, the exchange between PM and LOTO set out the political strategy of both sides, if political strategy is not too awful a term to employ when discussing such a topic. Starmer wants his bill, which implements a number, if not all, of the recommendations of Professor Alexis Jay’s report into grooming gangs, to pass.

Badenoch, meanwhile, wants an amendment passed creating another national review into the gangs, even though amendments cannot be passed at second reading, and all it would do is kaibosh the entire thing. And were that to pass, and CCHQ were able to create ‘Your Labour MP voted against an inquiry into child rape’ posts and posters for all their future candidates, then that’s something she will have to live with.

It was all most unedifying. At one point Badenoch, one eye on the social media clip, taunted Starmer with a call to “be a leader, not a lawyer”. A curious jibe on the same day former Times journalist Andrew Norfolk, who made much of the running on the scandal, wrote: “It was Starmer who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.” But there we are.

The only moment of lightness came from Starmer’s exchange with Ed Davey. The battles between the pair since the election have not exactly been bloodthirsty.

“While the honourable member for Clacton may miss out on his big allowance from Elon Musk, the spectre of the richest man in the world trying to buy a British political party should give us all pause for thought,” said Davey. “After years of the Conservatives taking millions of pounds of Russian money, will the prime minister now work with us to bring in long overdue reforms to party funding, so that power in this country lies with the voters, not wealthy overseas oligarchs?”

Starmer relaxed. “I think we all had a smile on Sunday when the honourable Member for Clacton said how cool it was to have the support of Musk, only for Musk to say he should be removed just a few hours later,” he said. “That is the rough and tough of politics.”

Over on the Reform bench, Farage pulled his customary funny face and, whether intentionally or not, led his MPs in contorting their hands and wrists into the Unicode shrug – ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Was it a message to Musk that the internet was better circa 2002, before he got involved, anyway? Probably not, but tell him that anyway.