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On days like these, Keir Starmer might come to believe there is a God after all. Fair to say the prime minister has been under the cosh recently. His popularity ratings tanking as people continue to feel fed up that nothing still appears to be working as it should. The local elections on Thursday are unlikely to provide any joy for Labour with Reform ahead in several polls. Even the election of Mark Carney has been a mixed blessing. A reminder that some politicians get rewarded for taking a tough line on Agent Orange. The Lib Dems have declared themselves honorary Canadians.
To cap it all, Tony Blair had just published a report on climate policy that even his best friends might consider to have been “unhelpful”. Tony is a former politician who is unable to go gently into the dark night. Eighteen years after stepping down as prime minister, he still yearns for relevance.
Attention, even. If he can’t be meaningful, he can at least be a contrarian. A thorn in Labour’s side, seeking retribution against imagined slights. Against Labour MPs, the overwhelming majority of whom weren’t even in parliament at the time he left. Some were even in primary school. But they must be punished nonetheless. For the thought crime of believing they could move on. Nothing less than total obedience and gratitude will do. Never forget who won three general elections. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
So you might have thought that Kemi Badenoch would have been keen to seize on the report from the Tony Blair Institute. After all, it’s not often that a Tory leader of the opposition finds herself more or less on the same side as Labour’s most successful prime minister. It’s even less often that Labour’s most successful prime minister finds himself Nigel Farage-adjacent. But that’s another story. For now, KemiKaze had an open goal. Six questions to exploit the gulf between Starmer and Blair.
But Kemi turned the opportunity down. Maybe she had noticed that Tony had been doing some frantic back-pedalling after realising he had landed in the net zero sceptic camp. That when he had said phasing out fossil fuels in the short term was a strategy doomed to failure what he had really meant was that phasing out fossil fuels in the short term was a realistic endeavour. That he had only been highlighting the problems of developing countries and was totally on board with the Labour government’s focus on renewables and carbon capture.
Maybe Kemi had noticed that almost every serious climate scientist had rushed out to rubbish Tony’s report and was having second thoughts about her own position? Unlikely. Reflection is not her style. Most likely, she had got an idea into her head and wouldn’t budge. This was how she rolled. Wake up. Eight double espressos – whichever was closest to hand – and sign in to X. There to join the rollercoaster wild west of conspiracy theories until she found something that suited her mood.
That’s the only credible explanation. Because after Starmer had surprised everyone by starting with a gag that was actually funny – a dig at Robert Jenrick for still running after his outing in the London marathon that creased up the Tory benches: it’s somehow reassuring to find there are so many Conservatives who find Honest Bob objectionable – Kemi used all six of her questions to call for a national inquiry into child abuse gangs.
It wasn’t that the topic was not important. It is. The victims suffered horrific abuse. More, there wasn’t a clear reason why Badenoch had chosen to raise it at this Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions. If she hadn’t wanted to go on climate breakdown she could have done bin collections instead. After all, the local elections were the following day. But Kemi insisted on returning to a subject she first raised three months ago after Elon Musk became interested on social media. It goes without saying Elon has long since moved on. He never cared about the victims anyway. He just liked the attention. The frenzy.
Nor did Kemi have anything new to say. There was no new information. No new angle of attack. And Keir could hardly believe his luck. He was off the hook. Because no one – with the possible exception of a few QAnon Reform voters – really believe that Starmer is trying to cover up the abuse. After all, as director of public prosecutions he was directly responsible for seeing that some of the perpetrators faced justice.
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Just as importantly, Starmer was able to lay out some fairly basic rebuttals to accusations of inaction. There had been a national inquiry, headed by Prof Alexis Jay, which had made 20 recommendations. None of which the Tories had implemented when they had been in government. Surely it made more sense to act upon the existing recommendations, rather than spending hundreds of millions on another inquiry which might come to the same conclusions? And if Kemi was hellbent on another inquiry, why hadn’t she and the Tories set it up when they had been in power?
It was irrefutable logic, but Kemi kept coming back at Starmer again and again. Hoping for what? That he might crack? Unlikely. It all made for a strange impasse. Deja vu. And it left a rather nasty taste in the mouth. Because you couldn’t help feeling that this was all happening at the victims’ expense. They had suffered once at the hands of their abusers. Now they were being used for political advantage.
The rest of the session was low-key. No real fireworks. Notable mainly for Tory MPs promoting their VE Day celebrations. Bernard Jenkin tried to drum up interest in a choral evening and sounded almost apologetic that they would be singing some works by German composers on such a patriotic evening. He needn’t have worried. Some of us gladly listen to Bach. Mark Francois hoped for some dosh for a Vera Lynn statue. “Hopefully, we’ll meet again,” he said. Starmer said they would. Though he didn’t sound thrilled by the prospect.
All the while, Victoria Starmer looked on impassively from the visitor’s gallery. She gave nothing away. Not even a smile at her husband’s jokes. She’s a tough audience. Also watching on was the erstwhile pop singer, Chesney Hawkes. At least that’s who he said he was. How were the rest of us supposed to know?
