How Kemi can improve at PMQs

We all know Kemi is failing at Prime Minister’s Questions. Despite the Tory Party’s attempt to suggest otherwise with videos titled: “Keir Starmer RATTLED by Kemi Badenoch” and “Kemi Badenoch DESTROYS Keir Starmer” (Which Ben Sixsmith suggests is a limp tribute to old Ben Shapiro compilation videos). Her performances are poor.

Gone is the obvious nervousness of the first few sessions, but every week Keir Starmer, not known for his sparkling wit, still manages to make her look weak and lazy. Sometimes he does this unfairly, but this is the game and it doesn’t exactly leave you #Winning when you’re complaining your opponent is cheating, patronising you, or if you’re drawing from the poison well of identity politics which she is prone to do.

The Leader of the Opposition made a good stab at it last week, trying to force the Prime Minister to reveal he was planning to use the defence budget (which he had apparently just increased) to funnel billions of pounds to Mauritius in the shoddy Chagos deal. He refused to deny this was the plan, which is as good as an admission of guilt, but somehow it didn’t feel like a victory for Kemi.

Starmer’s favoured tactic is PM-splaining. He presents himself as a details-man with every conceivable fact at his fingertips. If Kemi got off Candy Crush for an hour or two and did her homework she’d realise all of his decisions are perfectly rational, in a way that only Sir Keir (who sees his job as a public sector promotion from DPP) could believe. But his attacks work because, in their heart of hearts, even the most pro-Kemi Tory probably doesn’t believe she has a higher IQ than the PM, or that she does enough prep for the big weekly clash. Even her “lawyer not a leader” barb, doesn’t really work. It’s a good line, but ill-suited to her personally because it helps to highlight the cleavage between a clever-cloggs KC and a politician who seems better suited pitching to Coffee House.

The best Commons performers play on internal divisions, press the right buttons and wind up the other side

In this month’s magazine, Henry Hill points out that winning PMQs didn’t do William Hague much good against Tony Blair, a fact Kemi herself has allegedly pointed out — but, Hill rightly points out that winning at PMQs is still better than not winning PMQs. But why on earth is she (allegedly) pointing this out at all? There’s a sort of logic to claim that PMQs isn’t very important, but how could it ever be a positive that (on this metric at least) she’s trailing a proven election loser?

So what should she actually be doing? For a start she should be spending far more time preparing. A case in point is the week she raised a Telegraph story that a family of Palestinians had successfully settled in the UK using the visa application intended for Ukrainians. When Starmer said he disagreed with the ruling but that it had come under the last Tory government, it was a humiliation. Rob Hutton wrote “a more careful person…might have wondered if there was a way that asking about this might, to use Parliamentary jargon, come back and bite her on the arse”.

As well as preparing more she should, belatedly, go to Starmer’s Chagos briefing. He points out almost every week that she has not taken him up on his offer of a single confidential briefing on the topic, or anything else. He uses this to build on his narrative of her, pressing the point that he’s across the detail and she’s a lightweight.  Why doesn’t she go to the briefing and denounce the deal? The electromagnetic spectrum issue, which apparently means we have to hand over territory we’ve owned since 1814, is clearly a bogus argument entertained by the most activist Attorney General we’ve ever had. Kemi should go to their silly briefing and say a line about how she knew which room it was in from the white flags hanging from the windows.

The best Commons attacks are when you reveal things previously unknown. Surely the Tory party still has enough contacts within the civil service who might be helpful to their cause? Admittedly, there are few, as I wrote last year, but there are some. If LOTO knows which sores to press on and has people on the inside of Whitehall, it helps to undermine the PM. Although you need to be careful. Don’t use information hacked by the Russians, a-la-Jeremy Corbyn.

She also needs to coordinate with your backbenchers. LOTO should talk to Tory MPs who are due to ask questions so that their topics don’t overlap with those of the leader. When they do repeat each other, as I’ve noticed happening on Chagos, it seems the backbench question is marginally better than Kemi’s so they unintentionally end up showing her up. It’s just about ok for backbenchers to cover the same topic but from a sob story angle, e.g. “my farmer constituent John Smith says the inheritance tax changes have ruined his life”, which forces the PM into sympathy mode, but usually repeating your leader’s questions is a tactic best avoided.

Good Commons performers play on internal divisions, press the right buttons and wind up the other side, or have people to do it (as Ed Balls used to do to David Cameron), the best ones are genuinely funny (like William Hague).  It’s not an easy job to get all this right and I’m happy to admit my level isn’t Leader of the Opposition, but online commentator. But then again, I’m not trying to be Prime Minister. You do start to wonder though after weeks of watching her ill-prepared attacks, is Kemi really trying to be? The job of PM is somewhat harder than PMQs, a session she neither seems to enjoy, nor prepare for.