Andrew Gimson’s PMQs sketch: Badenoch warns Starmer that Labour MPs look sick

Kemi Badenoch has the great merit at the Despatch Box of not looking in the slightest bit intimidated. She said today of the Labour Party: “They all look sick.”

In order to stop looking sick, Labour MPs started jeering. She invited them to put up their hands if they had supported the Winter Fuel cuts. None, so far as one could see from the Press Gallery, was mad enough to raise a hand.

But one of the worst difficulties with a U-turn is that you infuriate the people on your own side who out of loyalty to the Government voted for the policy which is now being abandoned.

They spent political capital on an unpopular measure which their leaders told them was necessary, and now it turns out the policy was not necessary. They feel they have been treated like fools, and when in the near future they are instructed to vote for further welfare cuts, they will be much more reluctant to obey.

Sir Keir Starmer released news of the U-turn at the start of PMQs, in reply to a Labour backbencher, Sarah Owen (Luton), who asked “what measures he will take to help struggling pensioners”.

The Prime Minister read his reply: he reads pretty much all them, which does not improve his delivery. But this meant we were getting the best justification his team could draft for the U-turn.

He said the Winter Fuel Payment had to be cut in order to stabilise the economy, but now this has been achieved, and “the economy is beginning to improve”, the Government can ensure that “more pensioners are eligible for Winter Fuel Payments”, which change will be announced at “a fiscal event”.

No normal person talks about “a fiscal event”, but Starmer, though anxious to present himself as a regular guy, can never for more than a sentence or two avoid subjecting us to the jargon in which apparatchiks cloak their decisions.

“The Deputy Prime Minister is on manoeuvres,” Badenoch warned him. A memo has come to light in which Angela Rayner, sitting beside Starmer, suggests the way forward is to tax the rich.

Rayner adopted an air of injured innocence, but there can be no doubt many Labour MPs would prefer her policy to cutting welfare.

The Prime Minister at frequent intervals blamed everything on the last Government, and said Badenoch has “not learned or changed”. Talleyrand put the thought better when he said of the Bourbons: “They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.”

We have yet to discover what if anything Badenoch has learned, but Starmer has already found that conducting a U-turn is a humiliation.