PMQs: Sunak attack on Starmer U-turns hampers Labour’s locals victory lap

PMQs the week after the his party lost 1,000 council seats was never going to be one of Rishi Sunak’s best sessions in the chamber, but the Prime Minister can probably be reasonably happy with how things went today.

With some coronation- and Eurovision-related pleasantries out of the way, Keir Starmer kicked off the questioning proper with a good hit about the Prime Minister having “cost 1,000 Tory councillors their jobs”. A little later the  Labour leader also got in a nice dig as he pointed out that Sunak had lost last year’s “Tory beauty contest” to Liz Truss, “who then lost to a lettuce”. Referencing the Conservatives’ local election routing by not just Labour but the Lib Dems too, Starmer observed that “no matter who the electorate, the Prime Minister keeps entering a two-horse race and somehow finishing third”.

Sunak countered that, despite a decent local election showing, Starmer had no policies. With this, the Prime Minister arrived at the vein of attack lines that he would mine for the remainder of the session. Along with having “no policies”, Sunak hit out at Starmer’s abandonment of his ten leadership pledges, saying Starmer had “broken every single promise he was elected on”, highlighting the Labour leader’s recent tuition fees U-turn.

Starmer tried to brush these critiques away by accusing the Prime Minister of “peddling nonsense”, not a response that works when, for once, the Prime Minister is relaying something basically accurately. The accusation that Starmer is dishonest for shedding the policy platform on which he ran to be Labour leader (in a fairly all-in way) is more frequently levelled from the left than it is from the right, but today’s session shows Starmer doesn’t have much of an answer for it wherever it comes from. On tuition fees, he has made a series of hmm-ing and haw-ing sombre comments about the need to be “realistic”, which would admittedly not translate well to theatrics of PMQs, but as it was, his response to today’s jibes from Sunak –  mostly, looking a bit cross – did not work either. This is not an attack line that is going to go away, so it’s really something Starmer should get a handle on answering, sooner rather than later.

Less effective than the attack line itself was Sunak’s continued attempt to make “Sir Softy” happen as a political nickname, with the Prime Minister asserting that Starmer’s U-turns made him “not just Sir Softy but Sir Flakey too”. One can only assume Sunak is setting up the pieces, week by week, for some kind of ice cream truck related pay-off in a few weeks time.