If London politicos needed any reminding that the recess was over, it came when the windows in the Palace of Westminster rattled to the beat of German techno shortly before noon, the allotted time for prime minister’s questions (PMQs). Steve Bray, the ”Mr Stop Brexit” campaigner who has protested loudly outside parliament on a near-constant basis for about five years, blasted Zombie Nation’s Kernkraft 400 on a loudspeaker.
Inside the House of Commons chamber, prime minister Rishi Sunak and the man who is odds-on to take his job next year, Labour leader Keir Starmer, squared off in what felt like the opening scrap of election season. Neither is much of a showman and their PMQs sessions often disappoint seasoned Westminster hacks, although both seemed determined to appear muscular on Wednesday.
But despite their attempts to lay down personal markers, it was the ghosts of two more flamboyant parliamentarians, former prime ministers Tony Blair and Boris Johnson, that hung over proceedings.
Starmer faced his foe across the despatch box backed by a new frontbench team following Monday’s reshuffle. His new cadre of officers is unmistakably Blairite in hue. The new shadow Northern Ireland secretary, Hilary Benn, served in Blair’s government 20 years ago. Blairite Liz Kendall has returned as shadow work and pensions secretary. She was a Labour special adviser under its most successful leader, as was Peter Kyle, whom Starmer has put in the science shadow portfolio.
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There is even something of Blair in Starmer’s cementing of Angela Rayner by his side as shadow deputy prime minister. She has about her an air of John Prescott, the no-nonsense northerner (Welsh born but raised in Yorkshire) who deputised for Blair for two decades, the egg and chips to his lawyer boss’s Chateaubriand. As Starmer launched missiles at Sunak in PMQs over the UK’s crumbling concrete in schools crisis, Rayner could be observed behind him, roaring him on.
Sunak, meanwhile, took to flinging Johnsonian insults at his opposite number. He referred to Starmer as “Captain Hindsight”, which was one of Johnson’s favourite put-downs for the Labour leader. It was an interesting line of attack, given Sunak has at every turn sought to distance himself from Johnson’s approach to government. Yet here was Sunak proudly, loudly and conspicuously channeling his predecessor-but-one.
Could it be it part of some overture to try to tempt Johnson, the Conservative party’s best campaigner, and perhaps Sunak’s worst enemy, to put their differences behind them and unite to take the public fight to Labour in the upcoming election? Hardly, but it would be some turnaround if so.
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Starmer threw a few insults of his own back across the chamber, suggesting that Sunak was a “cowboy builder”.
“The truth is this [schools concrete] crisis is the inevitable result of 13 years of cutting corners, botched jobs, sticking plaster politics,” thundered the Labour leader.
“It’s the sort of thing you expect from cowboy builders saying that everyone else is wrong, everyone else is to blame, protesting they’ve done an effing good job, even as the ceiling falls in. The difference, Mr Speaker, is that in this case the cowboys are running the country.”
The word around Westminster is that both parties have taken strategic decisions to make the upcoming general election campaign a dirty one. The first few scraps of mud flew across the chamber on Wednesday.