Sir Keir Starmer once more took shelter in his favourite black hole. In briefing sessions before PMQs he perhaps tells his comrades, “Well if you knows a better ‘ole, go to it.”
For Starmer feels safe in his black hole. It was constructed for him by the last Conservative Government, and he believes it to be impregnable.
Rishi Sunak fired a precision missile. He accepted the decision to scrap the Winter Fuel Payment has been made, but asked whether the Government will now “publish the impact assessment” carried out before that decision was taken.
The Prime Minister immediately took refuge in the void created for him by the other side: “They left a £22 billion black hole.”
As Leader of the Opposition, Starmer was reluctant to depart from his prepared script at PMQs, which by the end of his six questions often failed to correspond to the answers given by Sunak.
As Prime Minister, Starmer is just as reluctant to depart from his script, from which in the photograph above this piece he can be seen reading. He gives the dismal impression that he proposes to baffle inquiry and suppress debate for the next five years by repeating the same handful of phrases over and over again.
It would, of course, be unfair to expect any PM to answer every question which is put. Many of these questions are designed to be unanswerable.
But if one decides not to answer a question, there is much to be said for shifting the debate onto more favourable ground, and this Starmer cannot do as long as he hunkers down in his black hole, to which today he referred about a dozen times.
Nigel Farage (Reform, Clacton) said there were celebratory scenes yesterday outside various prisons as “serious career criminals” were released in order to make room for “people who have said unpleasant things on Facebook”, and wondered whether the Prime Minister understands the “growing anger” among the public at “two-tier policing and a two-tier justice system”.
Starmer replied in an aggrieved tone: “I’m angry to be put in a position of having to release people who should be in prison because the last Government broke the prison service.” Here was a variant of the black hole defence which worked fine.
Torsten Bell (Lab, Swansea West) treated the House to an economics lecture which was, thanks heavens, terminated by the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who told him “it’s meant to be a question not a statement”.
But the Speaker still has work to do to stop MPs reading their questions, preceded by platitudinous statements of the obvious.
Starmer cannot be stopped from reading if he wishes, and on various matters of Government policy must use exactly the right words, but he too would benefit from tearing up his script.