Backbencher steals show as Kendall left high and dry

Poor Liz Kendall. No doubt Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves had irresistible reasons of state for not being on the front bench to support her during the second reading of her Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill.

- DONALD MACINTYRE

But their absence rather underlined the loneliness of her task of beginning the very debate that posed the biggest challenge to the prime minister’s and his chancellor’s authority since they came to office a year ago: welfare cuts.

Nor was it that surprising that the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch pulled rank on her own work and pensions shadow secretary, Helen Whately, by leading for the opposition herself. Hers was hardly one of the great parliamentary performances, to put it mildly.

But sensing an easy wicket, Badenoch made a reasonable job of navigating between the (in reality, irreconcilable) goals of joining the Labour rebels in opposition to the welfare bill, and the fact that all her instincts would be for something far more draconian than even this government has so far contemplated.

Even if Badenoch’s crack at the “ambitious backbench bootlickers” - who had gone on the airwaves to support the original unamended bill and had now “been hung out to dry” after the eleventh-hour concessions designed to prevent a government defeat - did not strike a chord on the benches opposite, her self-evident proposition that the bill was rushed job to fill a hole in Reeves’s fiscal figures certainly would have done.