Stephen Pollard on this week's PMQs

The passage below is another extract from one of his articles tweeted on X by Stephen Pollard,

Stephen Pollard on X: here, 

this time from his Daily Telegraph piece on today's Prime Ministers' Questions.


Is there a more pathetic sight than Sir Keir Starmer?

"Is there a more pathetic sight than Sir Keir Starmer, the Black Knight of politics, at PMQs? 

Every week he arrives for his joust with Kemi Badenoch, and every week he leaves after doing his impression of the character from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. As one deadly Badenoch barb after another slices limb after limb off, on he ploughs: “Tis but a scratch.”

It’s a truism that Badenoch has found her voice at PMQs but, in recent months, she has been presented with a weekly Michelin three-star menu of topic choices, all of them lethal.

The obvious choice this week would have been Peter Mandelson, whose downfall Badenoch has both hastened and deepened with her expert cross-examinations of the former director of public prosecutions-turned-PM. She chose instead to tackle an issue that the Conservative Party’s private polling is telling her is rich in promise – student loans.


Fresh from her would-be mauling by “money saving expert” Martin Lewis during her Good Morning Britain interview on Monday (a man for whom the phrase “the ego has landed” could have been coined) – a mauling in which the aggressor ended up on the floor, with Badenoch’s deft handling of his in-your-face mansplaining making Lewis look out of control – the Tory leader can see the salience of becoming the graduates’ champion.

If student loans did for Nick Clegg in the coalition, the hope is that they can do the opposite for Badenoch if she can force action from Starmer and Bridget Phillipson to deal with the “inflation-plus” formula for repayments. As Badenoch pointed out today, Starmer promised in his leadership manifesto to abolish the entire system, while Phillipson pledged in opposition that graduates would pay less under Labour. Pay Less Under Labour is a slogan resonant in irony; is there anything which doesn’t cost more?

But although she led on student loans, Badenoch managed to shoehorn in a reference to Labour being described as the “paedo defenders’ party” (apparently the first-ever use of the word paedo at PMQs). Cue much faux outrage from the Labour benches and the PM – outrage undermined by the fact that it was a Labour MP who reportedly coined the phrase.

As for the PM, it is also a pathetic spectacle in another sense of the word. There is deep pathos in the sight of a man who won a landslide victory but, in office, has nothing more to say, in response to Badenoch, than the same litany of the last government’s failures that he used in the election campaign.

He has nothing of his own to offer – which will, in the past tense, surely be his political epitaph."

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