Sir Keir Starmer cut a forlorn figure as he hung about yesterday on the station platform, waiting for the train which will carry him into exile in Kentish Town.
It was difficult for the small party which had gathered to see him off – Kemi Badenoch, Sir Ed Davey, Nigel Farage, a few hundred other MPs whose names do not immediately spring to mind – to know what to say to the poor fellow, for frankly everything had already been said during the two years he has been taking Prime Minister’s Questions.
“I leave the country in a better state than I found it,” he asserted at one point, a remark which at least confirmed he knows he is on the way out, though next week, and indeed the week after, he will apparently still be here.
For most of the time, he stuck to the view, promulgated at every PMQs he has faced, that the Tories spent 14 years systematically wrecking the country, and he and his colleagues have as yet had nothing like enough time to put things right.
He also repeated on a couple of occasions one of his favourite catchphrases, “We will take no lectures from the party opposite.”
Starmer’s refusal to take lectures is perhaps one reason why it is so difficult to get a new idea into his head. He thinks he knows it all already.
Badenoch told him he was “too weak to cut welfare when he had the chance”. She said the extra money needed for defence should come from welfare cuts, “something the Labour Party will not do”.
What an opportunity for the next Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, to prove her wrong! But if she is right, and Labour MPs will not countenance welfare cuts, Badenoch has begun to sketch a programme with a strong appeal to those voters who said of Starmer in Lord Ashcroft’s recent focus groups, reported earlier this week on ConHome, such things as:
“He was looking after the wrong people. We both work full time; we’ve got two kids. He doesn’t care about us. He just wants to take from us and give to Sue down the road who’s literally never worked and claims every benefit going.”
The scene is being set for an election at which there is a proper division between Labour and the Conservatives.
Let Labour champion the ever growing Welfare State, while Conservatives uphold the interests of taxpayers.
But it was Starmer, when urged by the Lib Dem Leader, Sir Ed Davey, to fund defence by issuing defence bonds, who pointed out that this was “simply borrowing by another name”, and we already spend “one pound in every ten on simply servicing the interest” on our borrowing.
Dr Al Pinkerton (Lib Dem, Surrey Heath) complained that while he wants Frimley Park Hospital rebuilt, “the chosen site on the last remaining fragment of the ancient Frimley Common is wholly inappropriate.”
Starmer had come prepared for this question, and quoted a warning by Pinkerton that “if the hospital goes ahead, there will be no golf course”.
The Lib Dems stood exposed as the champions of NIMBYs everywhere, and especially at the local golf club. For once, Starmer’s own backbenchers felt moved to shout “more”.
Badenoch too associated herself with his line on the Lib Dems.
The Prime Minister also took a gratuitous swipe at Farage for receiving £5 million “from a crypto billionaire” and then lobbying the Bank of England on crypto currencies.
Here too was an attack the Conservatives will not have been sad to hear.
Andy Burnham did not attend PMQs. It seems likely he will become Prime Minister just after the House has risen for the summer recess, in which case he will not face parliamentary scrutiny until September.