Prime Minister’s Questions today was ostensibly about the Defence Investment Plan – or its absence. But Kemi Badenoch was really using the DIP in her six questions to build her narrative about Keir Starmer being unable to take any of the big decisions. He was, she said repeatedly, ‘paralysed’.
The Prime Minister, who loves to lecture other politicians on how they should conduct themselves, also very much enjoys telling the same politicians that he will be taking no lectures from them
Given Starmer refused in all of those questions to give any further details about the DIP other than that it would be coming ‘before the Nato summit’ at the start of July, Badenoch could have ended up looking like she was just churning through the same question without making progress. But she managed to vary those questions and extract further information from the Prime Minister. He also twice avoided ruling out raising taxes to fund the DIP, which moved the story on enough to make it more than just ‘Starmer won’t say when defence plan due’.
Initially, Badenoch asked him to confirm whether the DIP would ‘finally’ be published this week, to which he replied that ‘we’ve already taken a number of measures’ and ‘are committed to publishing the defence investment plan before the Nato summit’. The Tory leader replied, ‘that sounded like a no: we have wasted two years waiting for the defence investment plan’.
