Andrew Gimson’s PMQs sketch: Starmer in Wonderland

“Is there any belief he holds which survives a week in Downing Street?” demanded Liz Saville Roberts, leader of the Welsh Nats, after condemning Sir Keir Starmer’s change of mind about immigration.

“Yes, the belief that she talks rubbish,” the Prime Minister retorted, and for once put a smile on Labour faces.

How thin-skinned he is. Nothing must be allowed to impede his possession of the moral high ground. To criticise him is to prove oneself disreputable. For him there is no such thing as a loyal opposition.

“She comes here every week to talk the country down,” he said of Kemi Badenoch, who had the temerity to ask him why unemployment is rising.

She also mocked “his tiny tariff deal”. No man likes having his tariff deal dismissed as tiny, and Starmer insisted his is huge in places as various as Jaguar Land Rover in Solihull, Scunthorpe and in the whisky distilleries of Scotland.

“She turns up every week to carp from the sidelines,” he went on, and her criticisms were “totally confected”.

Badenoch claimed the Employment Rights Bill will be “deeply damaging to growth”, and observed that “you cannot have employment rights without employment”.

Starmer accused her of being “unserious”, insisted the Tories are “a dead party walking”, and indicated that he regards Nigel Farage as an altogether more formidable opponent.

When Farage was called, he encouraged Starmer “to go further” on immigration. The Reform leader spent much of PMQs smiling. He believes, with reason, that he has the Prime Minister on the run.

Starmer said it was all the fault of the last Government, which lost control of our borders. In Starmerland, whenever something goes wrong it is always someone else’s fault.

If in a year’s time unemployment is still rising, and our borders remain uncontrolled, Starmerland will no longer be even faintly distinguishable from Wonderland.