Tories gonna Tory: That allowed Badenoch to do what Tories do best: stress that it’s “not government that creates growth, it is business.” She pointed to warnings from the CBI business lobby group that the “dots of the government’s policy don’t join up,” and was able to once again flag protests by farmers over inheritance tax tweaks to try to paint Starmer as out of touch with the very people his government’s tax-and-spend plan is going to clobber.
Grow up: While Starmer didn’t exactly set the house on fire, however, he was pretty successful in painting the Tories as carping from the sidelines while Labour gets on with the grown-up stuff. Badenoch gave him some help on that front.
Firstly: She referenced a 2.7 million-strong petition doing the rounds on social media demanding a fresh general election. The petition is no doubt going great guns online, but Britain’s a country of 68 million people — and asking with a straight face whether this now means Starmer should just call it quits a few months in looked a bit student politics. “She talks about a petition — we had a massive petition on July 4 in this country,” Starmer roared. “We spent years taking our party from a party of protest to a party of government. They’re hurtling in the opposite direction,” he said of the Conservatives.
The G20 is silly, actually: Badenoch also risked looking a little unserious when she accused Starmer of “hob-nobbing” in Brazil while Brits suffer. That was a nod to … the G20 summit, which, generally speaking, it’s quite important for the prime minister of the U.K. to pop along to. “I suspect on their current trajectory, they don’t know whether they will attend the G20 or not,” Starmer hit back.
Dodgy joke of the week: As she read out a warning from biscuit-maker McVitie’s about the toll of the budget, Badenoch quipped that another “ginger nut” is causing the PM problems. POLITICO thinks that was a dig at Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, who is ginger. Be right back, just starting a petition to immediately sack whichever 20-something self-described “chief of staff” wrote this.
Trickier for the PM: Is the dire news from Vauxhall, the automaker that this week announced plans to close a major factory in Luton. The firm’s owners in part pointed the finger at government rules designed to speed up the transition to electric vehicles despite stalling consumer demand. Badenoch said these were the “real world effects” of Labour’s policies, and pressed the PM on whether he’s standing by the plan to ban the sale of petrol cars by 2030 “even if more jobs will be lost.”
