PMQs: Starmer leads on criminal justice failures while Sunak’s blows fail to land

Today was the first PMQs back after the Easter recess – and the first since the release of a series of controversial Labour attack ads targeting Rishi Sunak, of which Keir Starmer has said he stands by “every word”. The two men clashed over criminal justice and sentencing (although sentencing of child sex abusers, the subject of the most controversial of the adverts, was not discussed) but with seemingly no more or less venom than usual.

The Labour leader began the session by quoting Tory Party chair Greg Hands – who told LBC earlier this week that he thought public services were in “great shape” – asking Sunak if he had met any members of the public who would agree with this assessment. Sunak proffered a limp defence, which allowed Starmer to assert that the Prime Minister was “living in another world to the rest of us” (an echo of Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s initial response to Hands: “He’s living on a different planet, isn’t he?”).

Starmer stayed on the theme of public services, saying that Sunak’s Conservatives had delivered a Britain with “people waiting more than two days for an ambulance, because they broke the NHS”, “only one in a 100 rapists going to court, because they broke the criminal justice system” and “a record number of small boats crossing the channel, because they broke the asylum system”. Honing in on the case of a man who assaulted a prison officer but was given a suspended sentence, Starmer argued that Sunak had “lost control of the court service” and was “letting violent criminals go free”.

The Prime Minister’s responses to Starmer’s attacks were much the same as always: defending the Conservative record on crime and public services and criticising Starmer’s previous career as a “lefty lawyer”. Perhaps Sunak’s most notable gambit of the session was the attempted introduction of a new nickname for the leader of the opposition. The Prime Minister had a faintly maniacal tone in his voice as he declared: “That’s why they call him Sir Softy! Soft on crime, soft on criminals!”

This line fell somewhat flat as no one, bar Sunak today, has called Starmer “Sir Softy”, and it is not a name that feels likely to stick. A good political epithet has a kind of cruelty to it, the sting that makes you able to imagine it being delivered by a mean 14-year-old girl with a mean 14-year-old girl’s instincts for insecurity (consider Donald Trump’s “little Marco” or “low energy Jeb”). It’s the sting that makes these monikers stick, and there is absolutely no sting in “Sir Softy”. Starmer calmly responded by telling MPs that the Prime Minister had “just shown he doesn’t know how the criminal justice system works”, and can’t have been unhappy with a session where he ended up looking like the adult in the room.