Andrew Gimson’s PMQs sketch: Starmer skates on thin rhetorical ice

Sir Keir Starmer finds himself skating on thin rhetorical ice. Part of the trouble is his vocabulary, which is also thin.

We leave to younger and fitter colleagues the compilation of a dictionary of Starmerite clichés. It will include “22 billion black hole”, used every week at PMQs, usually several times, “14 years”, as in “they had 14 years to to fix this mess”, again an invariable prop, and “morally indefensible”, which at a guess – our younger and fitter colleagues will know how to do the computer search needed to produce an exact figure – occurs in two fifths of the PM’s answers.

We all have expressions which we use to avoid thought or stymie inquiry. The question is whether Starmer has any others. At the start of the piece in today’s Times printed under his name we find: “I saw how much it hurt my dad to feel disrespected for the tool-making craft he loved.”

Whichever Downing Street wordsmith wrote this article perhaps congratulated himself (the author was surely a man) on the novelty of this formula, brought in to avert the mocking laughter produced by “my father was a toolmaker”.

To use the same old words over and over again no doubt feels safe to the Prime Minister, but makes him increasingly vulnerable to questions in which his defence is discounted in advance.

Diane Abbott (Lab, Hackney North and Stoke Newington) asked for “less of this rhetoric about his five billion package of disability benefit so-called reform being moral”, and went on to say there is “nothing moral” about the Treasury’s attempt to balance the books on the backs of the most vulnerable.

Starmer observed in the course of his reply that one in eight young people are not in employment, training or education, and said, “I think that’s a moral issue”.

He cannot be expected to abandon his incessant claims to be moral, but does now find himself in a fight with his own side about whether he really is.

Colum Eastwood (SDLP, Foyle), sitting in the centre of the Labour benches, raised the case of a woman whose children have to do everything for her, who under the Tory system could get a Personal Independence Payment, but “under the Prime Minister’s proposed new system will get zero”.

Eastwood asked: “What is the point if Labour are going to do this?”

Starmer replied, “I’ve lived with the impact of disability in my family through my mother and my brother all my life,” and went on: “The current system is morally and economically indefensible.”

He will not cease using the words “morally indefensible”, but will have to get used to his critics on the Labour benches using them too.

Danny Kruger (Con, East Wiltshire) said that “after 14 years to get ready” Labour had no plan for reforming disability benefits and was now trying to do so without consulting the disabled.

Here again, Starmer was not prepared to cede ownership of the phrase. “They had 14 years,” he began his reply. But as Kruger had shown, 14 years can cut both ways.

Kemi Badenoch wondered: “Why are we having an emergency budget next week?”

Starmer dived for cover, as he always does, into the 22 billion black hole, whereupon Badenoch told him: “The only black hole is the one he is digging.”

How glum the faces on the Labour benches were. They too find the PM’s rhetoric thin. At moments when they were supposed to be cheering, perhaps one in five of them were.