PMQs Review: Whatever happened to the Conservative Party?

Once again this was a week in which, were the Conservatives being led by someone even remotely competent, Starmer could have expected to have left PMQs with a sore head. His deal to give up the Chagos Islands, Donald Trump’s decision to turn Gaza into a Sandals Resort, fresh new warnings of tax rises or spending cuts, a weird new lockdown scandal so innocuous it makes Beergate look like the abdication crisis.

But fortunately Badenoch is hopeless, so he was alright. To be fair, she did begin on the Chagos deal. “When Labour negotiates, our country loses,” she said. “Yesterday, we heard that the government offered £18 billion for Mauritius to take our territory in the Chagos islands. This is money that belongs to our children and their children. This is an immoral surrender, so that North London lawyers can boast at their dinner parties.” 

And then… she proceeded to ask about something else entirely. “Why did the secretary of state for energy security and net zero withdraw government lawyers from defending the case against the eco-nutters who want to obstruct the Rosebank oil and gas field?,” she said. 

Your correspondent has commented before on Badenoch’s predilection for not just changing the subject of her questioning several times in a session but even within the same question, but this was particularly mad. If nothing else, it let Starmer pick the one he preferred to answer, on Chagos. Badenoch, he said, didn’t know what was going on because she had not asked for a briefing.

The Chagos deal, he implied, had to be done for a hush-hush secret security reason he couldn’t say, but he could have told Badenoch in person had she asked. “When she became leader of the opposition, I said to her that I would give her a briefing on any national security issue if she asked for it,” he told MPs. “That is very important to the way that we run our democracy. She has not asked for a briefing on the Chagos case. That is because she is more interested in chasing Reform than in national security.”

This sort of stuff doesn’t matter much to voters, who neither know nor care what things like privy council terms mean, but it does to MPs, particularly those on Badenoch’s side of the chamber for whom a narrative is taking form about their leader’s work ethic. Just last week it was reported that she decided to skip a “top-level update” on privy council terms on the Southport attack by the prime minister’s deputy national security adviser, sending shadow home secretary Chris Philp in her place. This sort of stuff hurts.

It doesn’t help when Farage, already being treated as de facto leader of the opposition by some elements of the media, had a question minutes later, although he rubbed speaker Lindsay Hoyle up the wrong way by over-indulging in his role as the Common’s pantomime villain.

The grumblings around him rising, Farage took several pauses, theatrically enjoying the opprobrium, before Hoyle intervened. “Order! I want to get this question over with, don’t you? All you are doing is ensuring that it goes on for ever. Quick question, please.” Eventually Farage asked what the prime minister would tell his constituents, including, a little unnecessarily, “99-year-old Jim O’Dwyer, who flew a full set of missions on Lancaster bombers as tail-end Charlie”, why he was means-testing the winter fuel allowance while simultaneously giving up the Chagos islands. 

“What he should say to the people of Clacton – when he finally finds Clacton – is that they should vote Labour because we are stabilising the economy and boosting their jobs,” said Starmer. Farage laughed, but this sort of thing doesn’t work as well for him with just four colleagues and a grumpy speaker than in a Brussels parliament which indulged him rather too well.

Finally, one of the two Conservative backbenchers to speak was Gagan Mohindra, a man of such obscurity that whoever writes the captions for BBC Parliament didn’t appear to know who he was despite being an MP for over five years. He asked whether Starmer had broken lockdown rules while getting voice coaching approximately a hundred years ago.

He was, he said, “in my office, working on the expected Brexit deal with my team… What were the Conservatives doing? Bringing suitcases of booze into Downing Street, partying and fighting, vomiting up the walls, leaving the cleaners to remove red wine stains.”

Ah… that Conservative Party! Yes! I do remember them now!