Keir Starmer could learn from Angela Rayner’s humorous approach to Prime Minister’s Questions

The deputy leader of the Labour Party showed she is a far better match for Boris Johnson in the Commons, writes John Rentoul

Angela Rayner made fun of Dominic Raab’s holiday in Crete (Reuters TV)

Angela Rayner began Prime Minister’s Questions by offering her commiserations to Boris Johnson, via his deputy, for having made “absolutely zero progress on the trade deal that he promised” with the US.

Admittedly, she was helped in her performance by Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister, who is a better straight man as a foil for jokes than is his boss, and less likely to think of a witty reply.

Indeed, Raab carefully avoided any attempt at humour, sticking to his prepared serious lines. Three times he said: “If we had listened to the opposition we would never have come out of lockdown.” This wasn’t the answer to any of Rayner’s six questions, but Conservative MPs liked it.

In any case, most of Rayner’s questions were what might loosely have been described as “rhetorical”, in that she wasn’t interested in the answer except as a cue for her next joke. So she asked Raab if he still believed that British workers were among the worst idlers in the world – an embarrassing line from a book to which Raab and four other Tory MPs once put their name.

He replied that Britain had had the fastest economic growth in the G7 this year.

Then she asked how much a shop worker or travel agent on £18,000 a year would have to pay in lost universal credit and higher national insurance contributions. Raab said the universal credit uplift was always intended to be temporary. Rayner dismissed this as “a lot of words for ‘I don’t know’”, and told him it was £1,100.

Then she asked: “Can he tell us how many days a worker on the minimum wage would have to work in order to afford a night in a luxury hotel – say in Crete?” This reference to the former foreign secretary’s holiday during the fall of Kabul went down even better among Scottish National Party MPs than on the Labour benches immediately behind her. They roared with theatrical laughter, and whacked their order papers on their knees because they have been told off in the past for clapping.

Raab smiled, but his body language told a different story. “Whenever the Labour Party has gone into government, the economy has nose-dived, unemployment has soared, and taxes have gone through the roof,” he said.

That left Rayner to answer her own question. It is 50 days – “probably even more if the sea was open”.

It did not amount to a serious debate, still less a holding of the government to account. It wasn’t even very funny, now that I think about it, but at least Rayner seemed to be enjoying herself, which is something Keir Starmer could learn from. And there was a glint of her ambition when she said of Raab: “Maybe he should go back to his sun lounger and let me take over.”

She used her sixth question for an angry list of all the privations being suffered, or about to be suffered, by those on low pay or on benefits – a subject on which she always speaks with the huge authority of personal experience. Raab is hardly posh, but his po-faced recital of the Tory party brief made him look unsympathetic.

Unfortunately for her, Rayner’s class-war attack came unstuck when she accused Raab of complaining about having to share his 115-room “taxpayer-funded mansion” with the foreign secretary. That gave the deputy prime minister the chance to point out primly that Chevening, the country house in question, is funded by a charity.

Rayner is more like Boris Johnson in the Commons: more interested in the jokes than in the facts. Which is a reminder that the best match-up at Prime Minister’s Questions is Rayner versus Boris Johnson, which happened once when Starmer was isolating. On that occasion, Johnson had to curb his ebullience so that he didn’t appear to be patronising a working-class woman, while she made fun of him. Perhaps Rayner and Starmer should swap, and Starmer could take on Raab in a lawyerly exchange of over-prepared lines.