Britain’s head boy dishes up same old barbs for Starmer

The first Prime Minister’s Questions of a new prime minister is the one where everyone gets breathlessly excited.

- TOM PECK

And then, jacked up on said excitement, the new leader delivers some aggressively pre-gamed sledgehammer lines, everyone goes slightly mad, declares them to be Labour’s worst nightmare” and then spends the next however-long-it-takes being proved very wrong indeed.

Jeremy Corbyn saw off two prime ministers. Keir Starmer is already on a hat-trick, and neither of them are or were especially sensational at PMQs (which really doesn't matter, because neither does PMQs). The second week is when you start to get a sense of how things are really going to pan out, when things begin to set in motion toward their final destination, and it's hard to say, at this point, that Rishi Sunak has redirected the train toward anywhere that he actually wants to go.

Rishi Sunak has significant presentational skills as a politician. He has become prime minister for the same reason he became head boy at Winchester. He is polite and somewhat likeable in his own bland, unthreatening way. He exudes a sense of reliability.