If you can’t play nice, play dirty: The stage is set for a very grubby election

Hey, Siri, where do you hide a 6ft 7in body?

With a sense of anticipation akin to breakfast time at The Traitors’ castle, MPs craned their heads for a sighting at PMQs of beanpole former minister Sir Simon Clarke.

Clarke was missing. Had he been murdered in the night by the Whips? Bound and gagged in the stone cell under Big Ben? His favoured place in Rebel Corner, the patch of green benches where the madder elements of the Tory right congregate, stayed empty as the chamber filled up before midday.

In truth, if Clarke was indeed deep under the Thames, the likely culprits were not the whips but his fellow right wingers, all steamingly furious that he had made a gloriously inept call for Rishi Sunak to resign because under him Conservative MPs “will be massacred”. Even the crazies realised that this is not their best re-election slogan.

A manufactured cheer went up when Sunak finally put his head in. He looked startled to have survived the night. Some leftover survival instinct in his party’s DNA rallied to his side enough to barrack Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

“I love this quaint tradition where the more they slag him off behind his back the louder they cheer in here,” observed an on-form Starmer.

To Sunak, he asked if the prime minister was surprised to be told by “one of his own MPs” that he neither understood nor listened to what voters want?

Starmer has grown greatly in the two years since I last watched him closely from the Commons press gallery. His early prosecutorial style of evidence-based questioning, terribly respectable but easily shouldered aside on the Commons rugby pitch, has been dumped.

New Starmer is emotion-based, sometimes bare-knuckled. He mocked the Tories for resembling the “longest episode of EastEnders ever put to film”, not a programme that Starmer seemed to be a fan of, and quoted with relish an anonymous minister who had called their childcare plans “a s***show”.

He lampooned Sunak’s “punishing schedule” and that he had accidentally created a personalised anti-immigration video for Nigel Farage, referring to some AI-driven Tory campaign trickery that will be jamming up our inboxes soon.

Sunak aimed low in reply, borrowing from Boris Johnson’s old hits. “This from a man who takes the knee, who wanted to abolish the monarchy, who still doesn’t know what a woman is … it’s crystal clear which one of us doesn’t get Britain’s values.”

That’s another change. Both leaders are becoming more personal in their attacks, which suggests the election will be a dirty fight.

Starmer jeered: “He spouts so much nonsense, it’s no wonder they are giving up on him.” The prime minister was a “one-man Pollyanna show” pretending “everything’s fine” as his government crumbled. “His own MPs say he doesn’t understand Britain and he is an obstacle to recovery?”

The Tory leader took another shot at Starmer’s past. “He calls it nonsense but these are his positions.” He said the former lawyer “chose to represent a now proscribed terrorist group [Hizb ut-Tahrir]”, and “chose to campaign against the deportation of foreign national offenders”. No taxi-rank principle to use in his defence. “Those are his values, that is how he should be judged.” Starmer was “a human weather vane”.

Starmer showed he can respond in kind. “I was director of public prosecutions putting terrorists and murderers in jail,” he said. Stabbing a finger at Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs banker, he went on: “He was making millions betting on the misery of working people during the financial crisis.”

On the Tory front bench, Commons leader Penny Mordaunt on Sunak’s right flank looked utterly bored. Health secretary Victoria Atkins, to his left, nodded eagerly whenever Sunak spoke. The difference between ministers who owe the PM their position and those who want his job.

But Tory backbenches put enough noise behind Sunak for speaker Lindsay Hoyle to threaten some with being sent to have “cups of tea”.

Starmer ended by crowing that “I changed my party, he is bullied by his”. Labour’s leader was ahead on points on my scorecard but his work was undone (in the chamber, that is, since the public had mostly tuned out by this stage) when Labour MP Tahir Ali, one of several backbenchers who raised the crisis in Gaza, crossed a party line by endorsing claims that Israel is committing genocide and “war crimes” and then demanded the PM admit to having “the blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands”.

Labour’s front bench froze in horror and dismay. Loyalist backbenchers shook their heads at their colleague. Sunak replied quietly: “That’s the face of the changed Labour Party.”

Later, down the corridor, some far-from-lefty lawyers were giving evidence about the government’s Rwanda Safety Bill, including Lord Sandhurst, representing the Society of Conservative Lawyers, and Lord Sumption, the eminent former Supreme Court judge.

By deeming that Rwanda is “safe”, the bill effectively “forecloses the whole argument in a high proportion of cases”, Lord Sumption told the joint committee on human rights. “I don’t have any doubts that this is not consistent with Article 6 of the Human Rights Convention.”

By the way, did you see Simon Reeve trudging thigh-high through swamps and festooned with insects in search of the elusive bonobo chimpanzee in his Wilderness TV series?

That rainforest, whose population looked so vulnerable, so impoverished, was the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The same country, Amnesty International records, where in November 2022 fighters for the Rwandan-backed M23 group summarily killed at least 20 men and raped at least 66 women and girls.

That’s Rwanda for you. So safe. So very, very safe.