Morgan recital

The worm has turned. Keir Starmer’s usual approach to Prime Minister’s Questions is that of a weary headmaster who can’t believe the sixth form have trashed their common room again, because they’re only hurting themselves. On Wednesday we saw a new Starmer, a Starmer who has frankly had enough of your nonsense. This Starmer wasn’t disappointed. He was angry.

Ever since Monday evening, when Labour MPs assured us they had seen a new side of the prime minister, we had been waiting to find out whether this version of him was going to be available to the rest of us, and if so, what it would be like. It turned out that it was, and he is absolutely bloody furious. Spitting. Mad as hell, not taking it any more. It was like one of those films where a florist, goaded beyond endurance, reveals that they used to be a Navy SEAL, and sets out to massacre a biker gang. Sort of.

Opposite him, Kemi Badenoch was full of confidence. Here she was, Leader of The Opposition, Slayer of Morgans, the woman whose brilliant questioning the previous week had brought the government to the brink of collapse, at least if you believe the voices in her head. Her opening question was short and to the point. Starmer had previously said that he didn’t let his staff carry the can when they made mistakes. “What changed?”

The prime minister’s response was initially insipid, giving no clue of the rage boiling within him. “I’ve accepted responsibility and apologised for the mistakes that I made,” he began. Was he going to tell us again that processes had been followed? As it turned out, no. Having buried Morgan McSweeney at the weekend, he was now going to praise him. His former chief of staff had helped change Labour, and deliver an election landslide. The Conservative parliamentary party was the smallest it had been in 100 years. The prime minister looked at Badenoch. “And what’s her great achievement? To make it even smaller!” Oooh, miaow!

It would take more than that to knock the Tory leader off course. The prime minister had expressed full confidence in McSweeney then sacked him. (Here a misguided Labour MP squealed “he resigned!”, prompting gales of opposition laughter.) He’d expressed full confidence in Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald, and now he was sacking him. “What changed?”

Starmer responded by listing all the Tories who had defected to Reform. Badenoch accused him of “demonstrating stratospheric levels of delusion”. Well, there’s a lot of it about. She turned to former Downing Street communications chief Matthew Doyle, sent to the Lords despite helping the election campaign of a friend who, at the time, was charged with child sex offences. This was tricky ground for the prime minister: if giving a job to one person who was over-friendly with a sex offender is unfortunate, doing it a second time definitely looks like carelessness.

“Matthew Doyle did not give a full account of his actions,” Starmer began. Another man thrown overboard! Badenoch fired back, correctly, that whatever Doyle had done, the Sunday Times had given a pretty full account of his actions in time for the prime minister to rescind the offer of a peerage, as he probably now wishes he’d done.

It was becoming feisty. The Tory leader fired numbers — “three cabinet secretaries, fourchiefs of staff, five directors of communications” — and the prime minister fired back: “five prime ministers, seven chancellors, eight home secretaries, eight foreign secretaries, 16 housing secretaries.”

If his approach to Badenoch was angrier than usual, his response to Ed Davey made us gasp. Usually his exchanges with the Liberal Democrat leader are tinged by a sense of mutual sadness that they’re not in the same party. Not this time. After Davey asked whether all these scandals might be damaging faith in politics, the prime minister rose, his voice shaking with fury, his finger quivering as he jabbed it towards Davey. “Millions of people have been let down for years and years and years,” he snarled. “One of the reasons was austerity.” When was Davey going to apologise for that?

“I think I touched a raw nerve,” Davey observed. But there were tactics here. After days and weeks and months of Labour MPs indulging in their favourite sport of briefing against each other, Starmer was appealing to their tribal instincts, reminding them that what unites them is a hatred of all the other parties, even the cuddly Lib Dems. As he sat down, Rachel Reeves gave him an enthusiastic pat on the arm.

Choosing a winner in these exchanges is subjective, but Starmer had come out swinging in a way we hadn’t seen before. Having gone into the chamber with an impossible position to defend, he probably bought himself some breathing space. None of that changes any of his fundamental problems. Perhaps the next chief of staff will do that.

On the way into PMQs, an MP had complained to me that there’s little wit in the chamber these days. With the final question, Ayoub Khan would prove them wrong. He is one of the independent MPs elected by voters angry about Labour’s position on Gaza, and sits in the furthest bench from the prime minister, behind the row occupied by Reform MPs. He had a question about the ongoing bin strikes in his Birmingham constituency.

“Rubbish,” Khan began, “is building up right beneath my very nose.” It took the chamber a moment to appreciate the joke. Richard Tice laughed in admiration. Tim Farron clapped his hands in quiet applause. Sarah Pochin turned around in outrage, and Nigel Farage tried, not very successfully, to look amused. The Reform leader has a very thin skin, and we can be sure that if he ever becomes prime minister, it won’t take him 18 months to show his angry side.