PMQs Review: Sunak lets Starmer off the hook

Unfortunately for the Conservatives, the last man you’d want to be presented with an open goal is Sunak, the Fast Show’s Unlucky Alf of politics. So, with Starmer there for the taking, the Conservative leader used all six of his questions on national security. 

Which isn’t to say national security isn’t important – for the record, national security is important – it’s just that, well, journalists were watching. Couldn’t he have chucked in a Swift song pun? Boris Johnson would have said something about Starmer not being able to SHAKE THESE ALLEGATIONS OFF, MR SPEAKER! and been feted by the sketchwriters as some sort of modern-day Bill Hicks.

Sunak asked if foreign secretary David Lammy would use his meetings in China this week to condemn the country’s recent excursions into the Taiwan Strait. Starmer said he would (sort of). Sunak asked whether the imprisonment of the Hong Kong democracy Jimmy Lai was politically motivated. Starmer said it was. Sunak asked if Starmer was prepared to sanction any Chinese business or individual involved in aiding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Starmer said he was.

And on it went, Starmer presumably delighted to have wriggled free, with Sunak letting him off the hook in a performance redolent of Jeremy Corbyn’s early days when he subcontracted the questions to the general public and ended up reading out Facebook posts asking David Cameron if he’d seen a couple from Buxton’s missing dog.

But then it suddenly got weirdly feisty with Starmer, having presumably anticipated a more testing session, going ahead and giving his political answer to the final question – whether Lammy would tell the Chinese government to lift its sanctions on a number of MPs.

“He speaks about the record of the last government – that record was 14 years of failure!” he said. “Six years of austerity! Three years of Brexit logjam! Then Johnson, Truss and the leader of the opposition – utter failure!” All of which is demonstrably true, but, eagle-eyed readers may have spotted, not entirely relevant to whether the foreign secretary would be raising sanctions on MPs with his Chinese counterparts.

Elsewhere, Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey got a news line with a question about whether the government would sanction Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who have said some pretty awful things about the treatment of Palestinians. Starmer said Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s comments were “abhorrent” and he “will look at” possible sanctions.

But in the main – and, it would seem, the case for this Parliament – MPs kept it parochial, in the main asking questions relevant only to their local communities.

One of these was Adrian Ramsay, co-leader of the Green Party, who by now should have realised he is a national figure and may want to use a rare PMQ more productively. People in his Waveney Valley constituency, he said, were struggling to find an NHS dentist. People had “to pull out their own teeth”, he complained. Although, to be fair, pulling teeth seems a strangely apt metaphor for this particular session.