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Andy Burnham had a reasonable first outing at Prime Minister’s Questions today. He didn’t flounder, but he didn’t make it look easy, either. He did, though, manage to provide answers to Kemi Badenoch’s questions in a way that his predecessor had routinely failed to. Unlike Keir Starmer, Burnham actually engaged with what the leader of the opposition was asking. It’s early days, though: he also agreed to have meetings with a lot of MPs about their pet issues, and he may find that he quite quickly gives up both the habit of answering the question and of accepting invitations to discuss everything with everyone.
Badenoch opened by jokingly congratulating the new prime minister on his ‘stamina’, which raised a laugh. She noted that he had spent three hours in the Commons yesterday, but asked him if there was a single spending request that Labour MPs had made to which he’d said no. The Prime Minister replied: ‘What I can say to the right hon lady is I was quite clear in my statement about the need to get the welfare bill down. I do not want to be a prime minister that sees a situation where we have so many people in their twenties not in education, employment or training. I can’t defend that.’ He said this was ‘one area where we can engage in problem solving rather than point scoring’. It was a good first answer, which also made it harder for Badenoch to then accuse him of failing to cut the welfare bill – even though that’s precisely what she then did. She also pointed out that he had in fact not answered the question about which spending request he had said no to. She argued it was ‘delightful’ that he wanted to make everyone happy, but that a prime minister has to be a ‘leader, not a people pleaser’.
