‘That’s the way to do it!’ Keir Starmer finally looks like a prime minister

Some people decry yah-boo politics, but the main thing that is wrong with it is that it is usually done so badly. So today was good news for those of us who enjoy politics as theatre, as Keir Starmer, who is not a natural knockabout debater, finally raised his game.

The Labour leader still had to read them out, but someone had written a string of decent lines for him, which he delivered with some punch. He started by reminding the prime minister that he had had to correct the record last week about employment statistics, and wondering if he wanted to update that correction now that 1,000 Tory councillors had lost their jobs.

Rishi Sunak, who is a natural knockabout debater, had come armed with a good quotation from Tony Blair, to whom both men wish to be heir. Blair had said that Starmer could be as cocky as he likes about the local elections, but that come the general election it is policy that counts. Sunak said that was a problem for Starmer, because he hasn’t got any. Which is true enough to be wounding.

Starmer had some fun with the Conservative spin before the local elections, when they predicted that they would lose 1,000 seats, saying that this was one promise the party had actually kept. Tory MPs shifted uncomfortably, knowing that the 1,000 target was one that the party was not supposed to hit, so that it could claim to have done better than expected.

Starmer spoiled the effect by recycling some old lines about Sunak not having a mandate, because he lost to Liz Truss who then lost to a lettuce. Sunak, who can think on his feet, said that this was a bit rich from someone who had broken the promises on which he had been elected leader.

It was all good-quality yah-boo – and, for once, evenly matched. The Labour whips had done their job this time in working the slapstick arts. Labour MPs had obviously been told to cheer loudly when Starmer entered the chamber, which is a tribal show that the Tories always accord their leader, orchestrated by Marcus Jones, the deputy chief whip, who stands by the speaker’s chair.

The Labour side also put up a wall of noise to greet each of Starmer’s many punchlines, whether they were funny and effective or not. Again, that is something that the Tories have been better at since at least the Jeremy Corbyn years.

Neither side could keep it up for the full six questions. Sunak lapsed into cheap sloganising, calling Starmer “not just Sir Softie but Sir Flaky too”, and got himself lost in what he unwisely called a “quick history lesson”, accusing Labour of having “wanted a longer lockdown”.

Starmer had a couple of good asides, referring to Theresa May as “one of his more electorally successful predecessors” and saying: “I’m sure the prime minister must have met some working people in recent weeks.” But his final question, the usual “everything is terrible everywhere 24 tax rises”, meandered pointlessly into nothing.

Sunak ended their exchanges by saying, presumably in relation to his cringe-making interview as a teenager admitting that he didn’t have any working-class friends, that “we all say silly things when younger”, and reminding Starmer that “in his 40s he was still talking about abolishing the monarchy”.

All good clean fun, at least compared with some of Labour’s recent output, with the party publishing adverts claiming that Sunak wants to keep paedophiles out of prison, and Starmer going after the prime minister’s wealth.

It does matter, a bit, because the morale of MPs is affected by the weekly gladiatorial combat. Since Sunak became prime minister, it has been a truism that he is more popular than his party, and that Starmer is less popular than his. But Labour winning real votes in real ballot boxes, and becoming again the largest party in local government for the first time since 2002, has levelled the playing field.

Labour MPs dared to believe that Starmer could be prime minister next year – even if, privately, they might think it would be as the head of a minority government in a hung parliament – and today they cheered him as if they meant it.