Edgeless Badenoch helps PM breeze into summer

Beware the phrase “everyone knows”. When a consensus takes hold, it is worth checking that it is soundly based. Everyone knows, for example, that the Labour government has made a terrible mess of its first year.

- JOHN RENTOUL CHIEF POLITICAL COMMENTATOR

That means it should be simple for the leader of the opposition to embarrass the prime minister in the Commons, because all she had to do was to ask awkward questions that expose the government’s record.

Kemi Badenoch made a good start, by quoting Richard Hughes, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, who said yesterday: “Higher and higher levels of taxes are ... not good for growth.” She asked Keir Starmer if he agreed.

Funnily enough, he didn’t answer the question. “I tell you what’s bad for growth,” he said. “Fourteen years of Tory government.”

Lincoln Jopp, the theatrical Conservative MP, later said he could see why they were called “Prime Minister’s Questions and not Prime Minister’s Answers”.

But Badenoch ploughed on, asking Starmer for a definition of the “modest incomes” earned by “working people” that some of his ministers have implied would be exempt from tax rises. He gave a surprisingly specific answer, saying that he was working for “the sort of people who work hard but haven’t necessarily got the savings to buy their way out of problems”.