Keir Starmer is taking Boris Johnson's approach to PMQs
Starmer started the session with a line on the Afghan data leak, telling the Chamber: 'Yesterday, the Defence Secretary set out the full extent of the failings that we inherited – a major data breach, a superinjunction, a secret route that has already cost hundreds of millions of pounds. Ministers who served under the party opposite have serious questions to answer about how this was ever allowed to happen.'
Funnily enough, Kemi Badenoch chose not to focus her questions on that matter, instead asking Starmer whether he agreed with the Office for Budget Responsibility that higher levels of tax would be bad for growth. Out came the first flannel, which was that what was bad for growth was 14 years of Tory government.
Then we were treated to the same list that we hear nearly every week about the highest levels of growth, record investment, trade deals and so on. Politicians like to be repetitive as it gives them a better chance of making a message stick with the public. But the thing that's being repeated needs to bear some relation to the way voters feel about their lives and what's important. Tax levels will naturally have far greater bearing on that feeling than intangible statements about higher growth rates than other countries.
Badenoch did a bit of her regular defending of the stories' economic record, and then pointed out that inflation was up and the budget 'had high taxes: that's why the economy is contracting'.
She asked him what someone on a modest income was. Starmer produced flannel number two as he told her that she was talking the country down. His definition was: 'I think of the working people across this country who put in every day and don't get back what they deserve, and that's who we're working for.'
The Tory leader felt this suggested the government was coming for self employed people, but Starmer claimed that 'the self-employed are the very people who suffered on their watch'. He accused her again of talking the country down – a line he always found infuriating when boosterish Boris Johnson used it against him at PMQs.
Badenoch then said the Chancellor was considering a raid on pension contributions, adding: 'A tax on pension contributions is a tax on working people'. Starmer flannelled some more with lines about Labour making 'absolutely clear commitments in our manifesto'.
It wasn't long before he dropped Liz Truss and the £22 billion black hole in there too, just in case anyone was getting anxious that he'd forgotten to mention them. His payoff was another list of intangible and disputable achievements, and then 'Mr Speaker, we are only just getting started.'
More revelatory was the exchange the Prime Minister had later on in the session with SDLP MP Colum Eastwood, where he gave the clearest justification yet for the government's approach to the Legacy Act. Eastwood asked for assurances that 'no murderer is seen as above the law'. Starmer replied with a tribute to military veterans, saying he had the 'most profound respect and debt' to them. He then added that: 'Veterans are at risk because of the false promises of the last government. Let's be clear they made a false promises of immunity that does not exist. It was unlawful. It was struck down, and it was undeliverable. Their failed Legacy Act leaves veterans exposed with no settled process.'
With veterans' minister Al Carns still apparently on resignation watch over the issue, the Prime Minister was talking as much to his own side as he was to the MP asking the question.
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