It was Kemi Badenoch’s third Prime Minister’s Questions, and a pattern is becoming clear. The leader of the opposition arrives with scripted questions. These are of variable quality, as we’ll see, but they are at least recognisable as questions that someone in her job might ask as they tried to build a coherent argument. And then, in the heat of the moment, she will go off script. At that point, all bets are off.

So on Wednesday, Badenoch opened by asking Keir Starmer if he wanted to repeat his chancellor’s pledge that there will be no more increases in borrowing or taxation. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t, saying instead that he was repairing the mess he’d inherited. For some reason, this wound Badenoch up, prompting her first ad lib. “The prime minister is not fixing any foundations,” she declared angrily, “he is making everything worse!” Containing as it did the distinct implication that things are already pretty bad, it was a surprising line from someone who was in government six months ago.

Part of the explanation for this is that Badenoch’s view, it is increasingly clear, is that the last government was a disaster. Later in the day she would summon reporters to a press conference in which she would denounce her own party’s record on immigration. 

Back at PMQs, Starmer was accusing the Conservatives of confusion. It was a red flag for Badenoch. “If he wants to know what the Conservatives would do, he should resign and find out!” she shouted, a line that was very clearly not in her script. Badenoch has been in Parliament since 2017, a time in which no fewer than three prime ministers have resigned, so she probably is dimly aware that when this happens, the leader of the opposition doesn’t get the job. 

Never mind, her own side liked it, shouting for more. Was there more where that had come from? There was! “There is a petition out there with two million people asking him to go!” she told the chamber. 

At this point she went back to her script, but it was too late. There’s a particular kind of Extremely Online person who believes that two million people signing an online petition calling for a general election is meaningful. The parliamentary term for these people is “idiots”. Again, Badenoch must know this. 

It was particularly unfortunate in this context that, as she went back to her planned question, the opening line was: “He is the one who does not know how things work.” As Labour MPs cheered, Starmer gave the obvious reply: “She talks about a petition. We had a massive petition on 4 July in this country.” Crucially, he was able to completely ignore the scripted part of her question, which had been about unemployment, and quite good. 

But Badenoch wasn’t deterred. “What a load of nonsense,” she said, still apparently not on script. “We had a Budget in March this year, and tractors were not blockading the streets of Whitehall afterwards.” Would it shock you to learn that there was a convoy of tractors parading past Parliament in March? Although to be fair to Badenoch, they weren’t protesting against the Budget. They were protesting against the trade deals negotiated by her department.

The reporters at Hansard would later damn the puns with the cruellest means open to them, putting them inside quote marks

We shouldn’t get carried away with the idea that her prepared questions are terrific, though. Badenoch’s next line had definitely been written in advance. The head of McVitie’s had complained about the Budget, she said, before delivering a sentence that should have been put in a sack and drowned: “While the prime minister has been hobnobbing in Brazil, businesses have been struggling to digest his Budget. Is it not the case that the Employment Rights Bill shows that it is not only the ginger nut that is causing him problems?” She was clearly very pleased with this, leaning on each of the biscuit jokes in turn. The reporters at Hansard would later damn the puns with the cruellest means open to them, putting them inside quote marks. 

It wasn’t just that it was a weak joke, it was that it leaned into another Extremely Online idea, that the prime minister has attended too many international summits in recent weeks. People who say this never explain which of the G20,  the UN or the Commonwealth they think he should have skipped. 

Still, in some quarters, it was going down well. Up in the gallery, the exchange was being watched by Roger Daltrey of The Who, chuckling along with the Tory leader’s gags. Next to him was his manager, who was so pleased with a joke from the SNP’s Stephen Flynn that he got told off for applauding. The Labour leader has clearly lost the 80-year-old rocker vote. 

Nevertheless, and despite the appeal from Kemi Badenoch, at the time of writing, Keir Starmer had not resigned.