Let’s try another tack: Five questions in, Badenoch then turned to Tulip Siddiq, who resigned Tuesday night over an ethics probe centered on her links to Bangladesh’s ousted leader. Badenoch raised plenty of eyebrows when she claimed Siddiq was under “criminal investigation” — that’s not the case in the U.K. although she was named in a Bangladesh corruption probe — and then pressed Starmer on whether he’d give U.K. police the support they need to probe “stolen funds.”
Wriggling free: Starmer — billed as Mr Probity in opposition — should have been highly vulnerable here, but he did a decent job of contrasting the Siddiq affair and its timeline — swift referral to the ethics watchdog followed by an exit from the government — with more protracted dramas under the Tories. “Thank god the British public chucked them out,” he said.
Still: We ain’t as dodgy as the last lot is a … less-than-inspiring bumper sticker.
One more heave: Badenoch, clearly deciding she’d not opened up enough lines of attack, then went all guns blazing, deciding to take a pop at the government over payouts related to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and then sprinkle in some vague attacks over Labour’s action against child grooming. It was a shotgun in a knife fight, and diluted what might have been a relentless barrage on either the economy or Siddiq.
Helpful backbench intervention of the week: Does the prime minister agree that construction skills training is really really important, Labour’s Gillingham MP Naushabah Khan needed to know, right there and then. Turns out the PM did, and just so happened to have a helpful list of government measures on exactly this to explain from a pre-prepped binder of factoids. Politics is great.
Totally unscientific scores on the doors: Badenoch 6/10. Starmer 7/10. This should’ve been Badenoch’s for the taking and she started with fire in the belly. But a medium-energy Starmer soon wriggled off the hook as a specific list of warnings on the dire state of the economy gave way to a laundry list of general criticisms that struggled to stick. Like Reeves at the despatch box yesterday facing a barrage of, er, Hamlet quotes from her Tory counterpart, the PM got lucky.