Kemi Badenoch clearly decided that it would be difficult to call for calm around the Henry Nowak case, and then to spend Prime Minister’s Questions talking about it at length. The format of the session rarely lends itself to calm, and she had rightly judged that others – including Nigel Farage – would bring the matter up themselves. Instead, the Tory leader did what Keir Starmer did when he answered his first question, which was to call for calm. And then she moved onto welfare spending, using Pat McFadden’s private message to Lord Mandelson as an opportunity to revisit Labour’s failure to reform benefits.
But Nowak still dominated the session, and not just in the questions. The atmosphere in the chamber wasn’t as rowdy as it would have been during a normal knockabout on welfare.
Badenoch’s first question was how much the welfare bill had gone up under Labour. After Starmer had thanked her for her ‘approach and tone’ on Nowak, he said ‘as she knows, we inherited a broken system from the party opposite, and we are now improving that system’. Badenoch responded that the bill had risen by £20bn under Labour, and that there was no proposed legislation in the King’s Speech. Starmer insisted that his party was reforming welfare, adding: ‘They voted against it. Welfare reform is introducing a right to try, to incentivise people to take up opportunities. That’s what we’re doing. They voted against it.’ He added that welfare spending ‘soared by £88bn on their watch’. Both leaders are right that the other party did not leave the benefits system in a good place, but of course Starmer is still notionally in power, and so Badenoch argued in her next question that Starmer had given up on welfare reform. The two carried on going back-and-forth over who had been the worst on benefits, which wasn’t very inspiring.
