Will the Tories ever get past Labour’s evergreen zinger: ‘But you crashed the economy…’?

Kemi Badenoch’s work-experience scheme was not a conspicuous success today. At Prime Minister’s Questions, she copied an idea of Jeremy Corbyn’s, which was to give different members of the shadow cabinet a go at standing in for the leader.

Corbyn gave us Emily Thornberry, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Diane Abbott. Thornberry was brilliant at it, and hasn’t been heard from since.

Today, Badenoch gave us Alex Burghart. He is the shadow Northern Ireland secretary. His more important role, though, is the leader’s helper. It is his job to prepare Badenoch for PMQs.

This is one of the linchpins of British politics: there is no formal title, but it is how David Cameron and George Osborne made it to the top. They rehearsed Michael Howard for PMQs. It was their route to promotion. Anyone who thinks that PMQs is annoying or irrelevant should remember this.

Burghart knew, therefore, how important it was to shine. It would be the first time many people, including many MPs, some of them even in his own party, will have heard of him. He had to make a good impression.

Unfortunately, he tried too hard, shouted too loudly, and over-thought his first question: “What is the government doing to bring down inflation?”

Angela Rayner, who is good at these exchanges, looked disappointed not to be offered a more serious challenge. A question about inflation from someone who had been a junior minister in a government that gave us inflation at 11 per cent? She was contemptuous.

When Burghart returned for an unwise second go, she asked: “11.1 per cent or 3 per cent?” Given that the latest figure this morning for the main rate of inflation was 2.3 per cent, this only showed how much leeway the Labour government has on this issue.

Burghart then tried farming, an issue on which the Labour benches were less comfortable, although Rayner accused the previous government of failing to spend its farming budget and concluded: “I think it’s an audacity for the honourable gentleman to suggest in some way that Labour broke promises or raised taxes, when it was his government that raised taxes to the highest level for a generation. It was his government that crashed the economy.”

It is rubbish, of course – but it is also a greater truth. The Tories nearly crashed the economy, suffering only a minor prang thanks to Jeremy Hunt grabbing the steering wheel. But they left the public finances in such a dreadful state that, as Tim Shipman relates in his latest chronicle of misrule, Rishi Sunak cut and ran before the bills of failure could be presented.

Rayner produced those bills in answer to every question at PMQs.

She told Burghart that he wanted all the benefits of the Budget, but had no idea how to pay for them. “We took the difficult decisions. He is reinventing the past while we’re investing in the future.” It was just knockabout, but it worked.

The Conservatives do not yet have an economic policy, meanwhile, everything the opposition complains about in PMQs can be blamed on the inheritance from the previous government.

“Our social services were left on their knees by the last government,” Rayner told Liz Saville Roberts of Plaid Cymru. “Tory austerity has decimated neighbourhood policing,” she told Jonathan Hinder, a Labour MP who used to be a police officer. Cancer services in Wales were part of our “difficult inheritance”, she told Helen Morgan, the Liberal Democrat.

I have asked before: how long can Labour go on blaming the last Conservative government? “Fourteen years,” is the reply from some Labour MPs I have spoken to, still sore about Liam Byrne’s “I’m afraid there is no money” note still being brandished by Tories at the last election.

I think politics may have sped up a bit, but it may be many years, and many more auditions for deputies at PMQs, before Badenoch finally breaks through Labour’s all-purpose defence: “Don’t blame us, we’re just clearing up your mess.”