The builder who is fixing the foundations sounds week by week more glum. There is an undertone of grievance in Sir Keir Starmer’s voice.
Over and over again he draws our attention to the complete hash the last lot – a cowboy outfit called the Conservatives who kept sacking their chief executive – made of the job.
These incessant reminders of how over the last 14 years everything has been ruined have a lowering effect on the spirits. If, as he says, the Conservatives touched nothing they did not wreck, the country must by now be in such a parlous state that it is questionable whether anyone can put things right.
Starmer’s MPs mostly listen to him in silence. He gives them nothing to cheer, no sense of where they are going or what all their effort is for, just the gloomy idea that they are engaged in an interminable repair job which may not work.
Kemi Badenoch’s ebullience made a delightful contrast to the Prime Minister’s gloom. She was dressed in black, but looked as if she was enjoying every moment.
“At the CBI Conference on Monday,” she reminded Starmer, “the Chancellor said, and I quote: ‘I’m clear, I’m not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes.’
“Will he repeat his Chancellor’s pledge now?”
The Prime Minister declined to repeat it. “We’re fixing the foundations,” he said. “I’m not going to write the next five years of Budgets here at the Despatch Box.”
“He’s not fixing the foundations,” Badenoch retorted. “He’s making everything worse.”
“We’re fixing the foundations,” Starmer insisted, and said the Conservatives hadn’t a clue what they would do.
“If he wants to know what Conservatives would do,” Badenoch replied with sovereign amusement, “he should resign and find out.”
Stephen Quinn, for the Scots Nats, asked a wordy but amusing anti-Starmer question which elicited an outburst of clapping from one or two middle-aged men in the gallery.
The Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was unamused: “The gallery will not clap and will not interrupt the proceedings.”
We are informed by this column’s invaluable but occasionally over-excitable adviser on popular music that one of the men who clapped may have been Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who.
Starmer has fallen out of fashion. The rock aristocracy parades its disdain for him. No wonder he looks gloomy.
The post Andrew Gimson’s PMQs sketch: Starmer looks gloomier than ever as he laments the state of the country appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Andrew Gimson
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