PMQs: Starmer shows his weaknesses in fumbled session targeting economy

In today’s PMQs, Keir Starmer attempted to target the dire Conservative economic record but somehow missed. While he got some of his attack lines out- yes, the Prime Minister is wealthy and wildly “out of touch”- the attempt at a broad brush attack on Conservative financial management ended up seeming scattergun and unfocused.

Starmer excels at PMQs when he goes narrow, and is able to rigorously hold the Prime Minister to account on a specific issue. This mostly comes across when he talks about the criminal justice system, where his time as Director of Public Prosecutions gives him a policy fluency that any politician would envy.

Journalists reporting fawningly on his “forensic” performances became something of a meme during his early months in office, but it remains true nonetheless. The flip side of this is that Starmer often struggles when it comes to the big picture, because he isn’t particularly ideological and doesn’t have a grand narrative to present that isn’t “Tories bad, Labour good”.

That narrative may be patently true (if you are reading LabourList, I’m sure you’ll agree), and has often been sufficient to see Starmer through.

Sometimes, however, his loose grasp on grand narrative catches up with him. Today was one such day, and Starmer and Sunak ended up plugging at one another about tax policy in a near-parody of a Tory vs Labour exchange. The Labour leader said he would scrap what he called the Prime Minister’s “beloved non-dom status” and Sunak played to the Tory faithful by channelling Thatcher and telling Starmer he was leading the “same old Labour party – always running out of other people’s money”. The lines were so familiar they seemed dated.

Starmer quoted former Chancellor George Osborne’s harsh assessment that Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss was an economic “vandal”, saying that while the Conservatives “like to pretend it was one week of madness”, the Tory mismanagement of the economy had been happening for thirteen years and counting. The purpose is clearly the same as Labour’s attack ads – to keep entangling Sunak in his predecessors’ records, and drag his personal ratings down as low as his party’s.

Labour’s leader also took Sunak to task over “24 tax rises in three years”. The stand out, clippable line of the afternoon’s lacklustre sparring was Starmer’s jibe that Sunak was “so out of touch that he looked at a petrol pump and a debit card like they’d just arrived from Mars”, referencing a bizarre video of the Prime Minister from 2022 when he did just that.

This was not a truly terrible session of the kind offered to us by the jittery, no-longer-in-post Dominic Raab a few weeks back. Yet Starmer’s uneven performance highlights the Labour leader’s broader weaknesses as a politician: he was not able to link up his attack on Sunak being out of touch with his criticisms of the Conservative economic record, or with Labour’s proposals around a windfall tax or scrapping non-dom status. In more capable hands this might have been worked into a cohesive narrative; today from the Labour leader we got only parts.