PMQs: Starmer seizes on Tory infighting to further discredit the party’s record

Boris Johnson’s final Prime Minister’s Questions was a fairly predictable affair. The outgoing Prime Minister reeled off his usual list of achievements in office: the speed of the UK’s vaccine roll-out, how quickly the country was brought of lockdown, getting Brexit done etc. etc. Keir Starmer tried to put a stop to Johnson’s self-congratulation, telling MPs: “Inflation is up again this morning, and millions are struggling with the cost-of-living crisis. And he’s decided to come down from his gold-wallpapered bunker for one last time to tell us that everything’s fine. I am going to miss the delusion.”

Starmer, in a repeat of last week’s session, focused his attention on the future and the candidates vying to succeed Johnson as Tory leader. He asked the Prime Minister why he thought Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss had decided to pull out of a televised debate between Conservative leadership candidates scheduled to be broadcast on Sky News on Tuesday evening. “I’m not following this thing particularly closely,” Johnson replied, in an attempt at humour that only strengthens the argument that he is increasingly checking out of his role as Prime Minister.

Starmer argued that the TV debates had been thought to be a “great chance” for the public to hear from the candidates first hand. “Then disaster struck, because the public actually heard from the candidates first hand,” he added to laughs from the Labour benches. The Labour leader tried to perform the job of the aborted Sky News debate, quoting some of the leadership hopefuls strongest criticisms of their competitors and of the government’s record. Penny Mordaunt, he told MPs, had described the UK’s public services as being in a “desperate state”. Turning to the man opposite him, Starmer asked: “Has the Prime Minister told her who’s been running our public services for the last 12 years?”

Johnson had little response to this question beyond resorting to a personal attack, dismissing Starmer as a “great, pointless human bollard”. Addressing the Tory benches more generally, Starmer shot back: “I appreciate they may not want to hear what their future leader thinks of their record in government but I think the country needs to know.” He argued: “The message coming out of this leadership contest is pretty clear: they got us into this mess and they’ve no idea how to get us out of it.”

It the short term, then, Starmer’s focus today was stoking tensions among leadership candidates – and within the Tory Party more widely. But longer term, his aim was to further discredit the Conservatives’ record in government and frustrate any attempt to rebrand following the leadership contest. Sunak and Truss’s decision to withdraw from the Sky News debate was reportedly due in part to concerns that the two previous TV debates had been damaging for the Conservatives’ reputation. Based on today’s session, the Tories were right to have been concerned that the debates were something of a gift to Labour. Starmer barely needed to come up with his own attack lines, relying almost entirely on the bitter criticism directed by Tory leadership candidates against their own colleagues.