PMQs Review: The ghosts of Truss and Corbyn haunt Sunak and Starmer

Your former leader is more mad than my former leader: it’s a curious ticket for both major parties to go into an election on and yet, simultaneously, the most fitting for our times.

With a plethora of options to arm himself with ahead of this week’s prime minister’s questions – the Lee Anderson brouhaha, the latest turn in the Post Office, the, you know, tanking economy – Keir Starmer chose to devote all six of his questions to Liz Truss’ recent stateside jolly.

It makes sense, in a way – all polling suggests 99.9% of the public thinks Liz Truss’ short-lived premiership was a disaster of biblical proportions, and the other 0.1% are Daily Telegraph columnists. But it’s also a difficult bruise to punch, because it does rather remind people that you don’t need to go far back on a list of former Labour leaders to find a similarly conspiracy-minded barmpot. And then you get the sort of scenes we got today.

“His predecessor spent last week in America trying to flog her new book,” said Starmer. “In search of fame and wealth, she’s taken to slagging off and undermining Britain at every opportunity. She claimed that as prime minister she was sabotaged by the deep state. She also remained silent as Tommy Robinson, that right-wing thug, was described as a hero. Why is he allowing her to stand as a Tory MP at the next election?”

There are not a few around Sunak who think turfing out Truss might be a good fight for the prime minister to have, but he was having none of it.

“If he wants to talk about former leaders and predecessors, the whole country knows his record!,” he responded. “Because he sat there while anti-semitism ran rife in his party! And not once but twice backed a man who called Hamas friends, Mr Speaker!”. Starmer, he said was “spineless, hopeless and utterly shameless!”.

The noise, at times, was deafening, the sort which, on any previous week, would see speaker Lindsay Hoyle rising numerous times to threaten various miscreants with an early cup of tea. But since his authority is now shot, he can’t do that anymore – which is what, one suspects, will do for him. A story for another day.

Starmer pressed on ejecting Truss. It was Sunak, interestingly, who first mentioned Anderson: “When I learnt of something I didn’t agree with, I suspended one of my MPs straight away!”. He boasted. Which, firstly, isn’t true (Anderson had the whip withdrawn after declining an opportunity to apologise) and, secondly, was a move rather unpopular with a not inconsiderable proportion of the MPs sat behind him.

It went on. Starmer pushed on whether Nigel Farage would be welcomed back into the Conservative fold. Sunak demurred, knowing such a move would be very popular among the very same MPs seething at Anderson’s treatment. He preferred to focus on Labour’s woes over tomorrow’s by-election in Rochdale where, he said, there were “three former Labour candidates, two of which [sic] are anti-semites… we expel anti-semites, he makes them Labour candidates”.

This also isn’t true: one of them, Azhar Ali, was actively stripped of his candidacy by Starmer while the other two, Simon Dankzuc and George Galloway, have not been Labour candidates since 2015 and 2001 respectively, before Starmer was even an MP, let alone party leader.

Speaking of which, elsewhere in the proceedings Liz Saville Roberts, Plaid Cymru’s Westminster leader, rose to say her party had signed the campaign group Full Fact’s pledge for an honest general election campaign. “We all have a responsibility to campaign honestly because the alternative is to be complicit in dismantling democracy,” she said.

Conservative MPs opposite laughed. They actually, audibly laughed at her for her naivety. What sort of a politician is this woman, they implied? Your regular reminder that, regrettably, we have months and months of this ahead.