PM and Tory leader enter maddening death spiral of dodging respective questions on Peter Mandelson and war in Middle East
There’s something weird going on in Westminster. A mutant pathogen in the water maybe. Whatever it is, Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch appear to have been struck down by it.
Both have had parts of their memory wiped. At times they now sound like the living dead. Keir can’t remember a thing about Peter Mandelson. And Kemi is a total blank when it comes to the Iran war. It’s hard to know which is worse. Keir at least has only forgotten what happened a year ago, so he can more or less have a half-life in the real world. Meanwhile, Kemi has no idea what happened last week. Or even yesterday. She is condemned to live in a permanent present.
All of which made prime minister’s questions a near pointless exercise, with Starmer and Badenoch talking past one another. Questions got asked but not answered. Two competing forms of amnesia battling to find a voice. It was just Starmer’s bad luck that Kemi couldn’t remember what she was supposed to be doing and kept asking about something he had no idea about. They might as well have been speaking in tongues.
You’d have thought that Kemi would have wanted to use her six questions to ask about the US war with Iran. After all, the crisis has dominated the news cycle for the past three weeks and may well have a massive impact on the economies of almost every country. Stories don’t get much bigger than this. A time when, in the past, politicians of all parties come together in the national interest.
