As I shut my laptop and left the Press Gallery after today’s session of Prime Minister’s Questions, another journalist leant over to commiserate. “That was boring,” they groaned. It was a reasonable assessment, but a bleak one given the context. This afternoon’s PMQs was remarkably tame considering that the streets of Belfast tumbled into violence last night.
Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch both acknowledged the violence, with notably similar responses. Both appealed – as they did over the murder of Henry Nowak last week – for calm. “No one has the right to burn people out of their homes,” Badenoch said, while Starmer lawyerly declared that his government will ensure that “justice is done”.
Instead, for most of the session, the pair traded insults over whose party has inflicted the most damage to the UK’s defence capabilities. The government has yet to publish the Defence Investment Plan, which will lay out a blueprint for how the Ministry of Defence will allocate its budget over the next decade. It was due in autumn 2025. It’s now summer 2026, and the plan has still yet to be published.
Badenoch drew once again on the words of the man who appears to be becoming her chief political influence, the former Labour defence secretary George Robertson, echoing his calls for Starmer to cut the welfare budget so that the money might be ploughed into spending on defence. Meanwhile, Starmer reiterated that he would not be “taking lectures from the party opposite” so many times, I wondered who exactly it was he was trying to convince. His backbenchers? The country? Himself?
All the questions on the events in Northern Ireland came instead from backbenchers. Gavin Robinson, the leader of the DUP whose East Belfast constituency was flooded with violence last night, called on the Prime Minister to protect and close “the porous border between our country and the Irish republic.” Meanwhile Ayoub Khan the Independent (Your Party?) MP for Birmingham Perry Barr asked Starmer what “pure cold actions will [he] take against those inciting violence and perpetrating violence” against people based on the colour of their skin.
Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, also pushed the PM on the events in Belfast, bringing it back around to his party’s specialist subject: immigration. “The Prime Minister is in denial of the rising despair across the country over his failure to stop the boats,” Tice said, before calling on Starmer to resign. The PM’s response to Tice was – barring a later jibe at Zack Polanski – his most animated answer during the 45-minute session. He accused Tice and his party of whipping up fear and exploiting the murder of Henry Nowak. As Starmer responded, Tice all but flung himself out of his seat, waving his order paper furiously at the Prime Minister and shouting: “Shame on you! Shame on you!”
Moments of intrigue mostly came from the periphery. Rupert Lowe, the bespectacled leader of Restore UK, sat in the corner of the chamber throughout, slumped on the bench watching the action unfold. During a question from Ed Davey on whether the Prime Minister would condemn the role of “social media barons like Elon Musk” in whipping up “division and hatred”, Lowe appeared to be struggling to locate his phone in the breast pocket of his grey suit. He was later joined by Reform’s Danny Kruger, who awkwardly grimaced at him as he sat down.
There were some unusual visitors in the galleries today too. Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, watched the action from above the Labour benches with an entourage of visitors rather than sitting beside her shadow front bench colleagues. Nigel Evans, the former Conservative MP for Ribble Valley was there too. Towards the end of the session, the pair giggled and waved at each other. Sitting opposite, looking diagonally down on the government, was Nick Forbes, the former leader of the Local Government Association Labour Office (where he was advised by Morgan McSweeney).
Next week all eyes are likely to be on Makerfield. If (and it’s a big if) Andy Burnham is successful, the ensuing session of PMQs will be Starmer’s final before he is joined on the government benches by his chief rival. For now, he appears to be enjoying the calm.
[Further reading: Meet Andy Burnham’s northern queens]
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