Up against a winking Dominic Raab, Angela Rayner was the serious politician

Labour’s deputy leader won the battle of the stand-ins at Prime Minister’s Questions, writes John Rentoul

Rayner, although undisciplined, conveyed infinitely more seriousness of purpose than the man trying to patronise her (PA)

If you want politics as entertainment, the Angela versus Dominic show was an improvement on the usual Prime Minister’s Questions, although the secret of good comedy is ruthless editing, and both sides could have done with a good editor.

The opening repartee was of decent quality, with Rayner, the Labour deputy leader, picking up on the prime minister’s comment to the travelling press in Rwanda that he was looking to the 2030s. She asked Raab if the cabinet would support the prime minister for that long.

Raab said the cabinet wanted him to stay for longer than she wanted her leader to. She responded with a counterattack on the spur of the moment, not something we are used to seeing from that side of the Commons. She agreed that she didn’t want Sir Keir Starmer to be leader of the opposition for much longer – “what I want for my right hon friend is for him to be prime minister of this country”.

She did something else that Starmer never does, which was repeatedly to demand a general election so that the people can say what they think of the government. That is a more effective line than Starmer’s wheedling plea to Conservative backbenchers to depose the prime minister and replace him with a more popular one.

Most of her questions, though, were as long and shouty as Starmer’s are usually long and boring. At one point she said working people were paying £500bn more in tax; then she was predicting that one million more people would be pushed into using food banks by 2030 – although as she was also predicting a Labour government long before then, that didn’t make much sense. Then she was talking about noisy protests, referring to the police confiscating the loudspeakers used by “Stop Brexit Steve” Bray in Parliament Square yesterday, saying: “They don’t like it when the public say what they think of them.”

Her whole PMQs performance was one long noisy protest, not that the police are likely to come into the chamber and issue her with a warning under the new legislation that came into effect yesterday.

Raab’s performance was quite different in tone, as he did his softly spoken, superciliously polite act. But his attacks on her were laughably unserious, as was advertised by his winking at her. He accused her of sipping champagne at Glyndebourne; supporting “militant, reckless strikes”; not supporting the RMT union; and voting against Trident six years ago. His account of Rayner being asked by the BBC if she liked the RMT – she apparently replied, “I have to go now; I have a train to catch” – was entertaining enough, but has nothing to do with anything.

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Raab’s wink undermined him for the entire session. It said: “I know this is a game.” Which meant that, even when he got the tone right, telling Ian Blackford of the Scottish National Party (SNP), “It’s not the right time for another referendum,” it felt as if he was just playing at getting the tone right.

Raab paid tribute to Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP, who asked a question about writing the right to abortion into the bill of rights. He spoke of the “huge respect I personally have for her in standing up to trolling and bullying” – on the trans issue – but he rejected the idea of amending the bill of rights.

He managed the unlikely feat of being even less serious than the absent prime minister, even though he sounded more reasonable than Boris Johnson, who always sounds as if he is blustering even if he is reading out the condolences.

Whereas Rayner, although undisciplined, conveyed infinitely more seriousness of purpose than the man trying to patronise her. What is awkward for Starmer, though, is that she also seems hungrier for power than he ever does. What was striking about today’s slapstick exchanges is that Raab was the joker and Rayner the serious one.