PMQs is truly cursed

Spectator

09-07-2025

In the Fifth Circle of Dante's Inferno, the damned are cursed to bob on the surface of the Styx, scrapping and fighting with each other for eternity, constantly stuck just at the point when the waters threaten to submerge them forever. Artists have attempted to recreate this – from Botticelli to Doré – but none have come quite as close to depicting it as Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch manage in the House of Commons each week.
There is a particular way Starmer spits out the phrase 'manifesto pledges' that gives his face the appearance of two cheap sausages in a food processor
We all know the cycle by now. The Tory leader asks about spending and the Prime Minister rants about the economic record of 'the party opposite'. Meanwhile, the country gasps on the surface of the abyss. We've gone past the 'fiddling whilst Rome burns' stage and are now much closer to the 'playing charades after the asteroid has struck' one.
Mrs Badenoch opened with Sir Keir's earlier promises not to raise various forms of tax. Did the Prime Minister stand by them, she asked? 'Yes', snapped Sir Keir. The word had barely escaped his lips before he was sprawled back on the green leather. Labour MPs typically lap this up, as if they are in the presence of a comedy maestro. I know these people have a cultural threshold so low that they think Adolescence is King Lear, but surely, they don't actually think the PM's evasive replies are funny? There are aisles of drying paint samples in your local B&Q with better timing than Sir Keir Rodney Starmer.
The Leader of the Opposition's questions continued. It's hard to choose which is worse: the PM's curt, rude monosyllables or his usual discursive babble, clucked out at speed. He employed this latter tactic for subsequent queries on pensioners becoming subject to rising tax thresholds. There is a particular way that he spits out the phrase 'manifesto pledges' that gives his face the appearance of two cheap sausages in a food processor. Neither tactic is enlightening or edifying.
Round and round we went: rising unemployment and shrinking wealth were met with the words 'breakfast clubs' and 'the NHS' – tossed into a word salad and bellowed back across the dispatch box. It was all about as illuminating as coastal erosion.
Things were not fine and dandy in the rest of the House either. It was getting rowdy over in 'malcontents corner' where Reform sits alongside the Greens, the Irish parties, Labour MPs who've had the whip removed, a few of the smugger Lib Dems, Rupert Lowe, Jeremy Corbyn and his backing band of Gaza Independents. Nobody's managed to come up with a good name for them yet: Procol Haram perhaps? Though from the look of Corbyn today – wedged uncomfortably next to Zarah Sultana – the Grateful Dead might be better.
Anyway, Nigel Farage tried to ask a question about migration only to be yapped over by either a Green or Lib Dem MP who kept shouting that the British people had been lied to over Brexit. Eventually Lee Anderson, the Little John of the ever-diminishing band of Merry Reform men yelled 'Will you shut up?' Tuts and counter-tuts followed. 'Very disrespectful!' – that harridan cry of the sanctimonious middle-class was yelled from the Lib Dem benches. The Speaker barely attempted to keep the jeering to a minimum.
All in all, another squalid and squabble-filled day in the Styx at Westminster. Come on in, the water's lovely.