Andrew Gimson’s PMQs sketch: Badenoch is very good at looking unimpressed by Starmer

Kemi Badenoch treated Sir Keir Starmer to a derisive smile: “I asked the Prime Minister what he believes in. He had to look in his folder to find the answer.”

Starmer affected to find her ridiculous, and the workers and peasants behind him continued to provide what she termed “canned forced laughter”.

But Badenoch is very good at looking unimpressed, and when she warned him that after a year in office his life will only get harder, one felt she might be on to something. For Starmer feels obliged to assert, in the language of an apparatchik, that he has never made a U-turn because he discovered a particular policy was unpopular.

So the U-turn on the Winter Fuel Allowance occurred “because we stabilised the economy”.

When Badenoch observed with scorn that he was “floundering”, he repeated that “we took the right decisions in the Budget because we needed to stabilise the economy”.

But is the economy now stable? Starmer insists it is. When asked whether the Government will keep the two-child benefit cap, he refused to answer, and said he believes in driving down child poverty: the language once more of the apparatchik.

The greater the pressure on Starmer, the more he excludes human emotion and resorts to wooden language, with a faint undertone of vulnerability.

Sir Ed Davey, for the Lib Dems, suggested to Starmer that “nothing is going to stop Trump messing this country around short of bunging a few hundred million into Trump Coin”.

Starmer replied that “we have a deal” with Trump and in a fortnight’s time steel tariffs will be back down to zero. Was there a touch of credulity in the PM’s tone? We shall see.

Sarah Pochin, the newly elected Reform MP for Runcorn and Helsby, wondered whether, “given the Prime Minister’s desire to strengthen strategic alignment with our European neighbours”, and “in the interests of public safety”, he will “follow the lead of France, Denmark, Belgium and others and ban the Burqa.”

The PM welcomed her to her place and said “I’m not going to follow her down that line”. He is not the sort of person to declare in a reckless tone that Britain is more free than France.