Andrew Gimson’s PMQs sketch: Reeves in agony as Starmer pretends everything is fine

The Chancellor of the Exchequer looked a broken woman. Sitting on the Prime Minister’s left, Rachel Reeves was clearly on the verge of tears as he declined to confirm she will remain in place.

Sir Keir Starmer still insists everything is OK. This sometimes happens when a boxer has been knocked out. After coming round the fighter believes he’s fine, while everyone else can see he’s in no fit state to carry on.

But the person who really looked in no fit state to carry on was Reeves. The Treasury said she had suffered a personal sorrow.

If so, why was she in the Chamber? Perhaps she decided her absence would be taken to mean she had been sacked. As it was, her presence, white as death, prompted fevered speculation that she is about to go, or has already asked to go, or at least is in an unsustainable position after having a black hole knocked in her Budget, not by the wicked Tories, but by the Labour rebels who yesterday forced the Government to abandon its welfare reforms.

Those same Labour MPs, or some of them, cheered Starmer into the Chamber, but how ironic their support now sounded. They have humiliated him, yet expect him to carry on.

Starmer the apparatchik duly carried on. Paul Waugh (Lab, Rochdale) had the first question, and made it a loyal one about the Government’s achievements.

Kemi Badenoch, up next, awarded Waugh the title of “Toady of the Week”, a remark in doubtful taste, for everyone knows he is is a decent man, but one which showed she was intent on drawing blood.

Badenoch proceeded to go for Starmer, and for Reeves too: “She looks absolutely miserable.”

The Leader of the Opposition invited the Prime Minister to confirm that the Chancellor would remain in place. He declined to do so. Reeves looked grief-stricken.

Here was politics as blood sport, with Badenoch hammering away at the steel wedge between Starmer and the Chancellor whose Budget calculations have so publicly been exploded by yesterday’s surrender to the Labour rebels.

Diana Johnson (Lab, Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham, and a Home Office minister) watched PMQs from the gallery opposite Starmer and Reeves. How agonised she looked to see such suffering, how white in the face as she witnessed the Chancellor’s misery.

“The Conservative Party believes that the country needs to live within in its means,” Badenoch declared.

Starmer and Reeves would no doubt claim the same. They too believe the country must live within its means.

But how, after yesterday’s rebellion, can they convince anyone that they actually know how to attain that end? Starmer continues to pretend things are OK. Reeves already knows they aren’t.