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Today was Andy Burnham’s second Prime Minister’s Questions and also his last one for five weeks. The mini-recess for the extended exercise in masochism that is party conference season means Burnham will have gone a little over three months in the job while only answering questions twice. It’s quite hard to think of the last senior advisor to the crown to have faced so little direct Parliamentary scrutiny: the Munshi? The courtier in charge of wiping Henry VIII’s bottom? Merlin?
There was no subject that couldn’t be unsubtly swerved towards this in an attempt to gain positive murmurings from the House
Kemi Badenoch took advantage of this rare opportunity to subject Mr Burnham to questioning on perhaps the most important duty of any government – the defence of the realm. Burnham has promised to raise spending to 3.5 per cent but not until 2035 and has, in the meantime, cut a number of army exercises in order to save money. How did that square with the past attitudes of the now-Chancellor of the Exchequer who led the ritual spatchcocking of Sir Keir Starmer for his failure to commit on this very issue?
Burnham did his disappointed deputy head (pastoral) impression. He looked hurt and repeated his line about ‘problem solving not point scoring’. It’s clear he’s going to trot this out as some sort of unanswerable riposte every time anyone tries to point out an act of incompetence or corruption by the government. It’s classic passive aggressive deflection and of course fails to acknowledge that most of the key moments in our political history have been the result of ‘point scoring’. Mrs Badenoch’s ‘point scoring’ today took the form of the not-unreasonable question of how on earth the government intends to pay for the necessary increases in defence spending when, as she put it, ‘The benefits bill is set to rise by £32 billion and they won’t drill for oil.’
