Rayner failed to live up to her reputation as a great parliamentary performer

The deputy Labour leader struck all the wrong notes in Prime Minister’s Questions, writes John Rentoul

Angela Rayner’s line of questioning ‘failed to get off the ground’ (PA)

Angela Rayner is a great parliamentary performer, so the prime minister’s absence in the Gulf was a chance for her to shine. She was up against Dominic Raab, the deputy prime minister whose role in the past has been to make Boris Johnson look good by not being as bullish as him, and to make Rayner look good by acting as her foil.

The Labour side of the house, and the press gallery, were looking forward to a bit of colour and entertainment, a change from Keir Starmer’s usual dry, over-prepared performance and Johnson’s waffle. But it went badly for Rayner from the start. The mood of the Commons was wrong for her boisterous approach to politics. Prime Minister’s Questions started when MPs knew that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had got as far as Tehran airport, but it was too early to be sure that she would definitely be free.

Rayner went ahead and asked about her anyway, with a gratuitous question about whether Boris Johnson’s “lazy comments” as foreign secretary had “worsened the situation”. This struck such a discordant note that Labour MPs behind her, who had come for the show, studied their phones intently, pretending to check for news from Iran.

Of course, Johnson’s mistaken reference in 2017 to Zaghari-Ratcliffe visiting Iran to train journalists worsened the situation, but now is hardly the time to mention it, especially when, as Raab rightly told her, the responsibility for Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s plight is entirely that of Iran’s “despotic regime”.

Rayner switched subject and asked three questions about whether Raab or the prime minister had overruled intelligence advice against nominating Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of The Independent, for his peerage. As the answer was “no”, this line of questioning failed to get off the ground.

She was reduced to repeating what Starmer had said last night about the prime minister “going cap in hand from one dictator to another” asking them to produce more oil and gas. That doesn’t mean that a Labour government would be doing anything differently, and indeed, it wasn’t even a question. As her attack on the Tory record – “they have had 12 years to reduce our reliance on foreign oil” – grew longer and longer, it prompted Conservative MPs to make more and more noise.

Eventually, she said: “I ask the deputy prime minister: is their only plan to keep on begging?” Raab started to say that Jeremy Corbyn, whom she had wanted to be prime minister, had taken Putin’s side over the Salisbury poisoning. Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, interrupted to complain that Raab was offering a “history lesson”, but then he seemed to change his objection, saying that Raab was straying from “the prime minister’s responsibilities”.

At the time of the Salisbury poisonings in March 2018, Jeremy Corbyn stated: “The attack in Salisbury was an appalling act of violence, which we condemn in the strongest terms. The Russian authorities must be held to account on the basis of the evidence and our response must be both decisive and proportionate.”

Raab thanked the speaker and carried on making the point about Rayner’s support for Corbyn, quoting her as saying that Corbyn was a strong leader and that she “can’t wait for him to become prime minister”. It was a cheap shot, but it was more effective than anything Rayner could muster. For her sixth and last question she did a tour of Labour’s greatest hits, from a windfall tax on energy companies “enjoying profits they didn’t even expect” to a government who “partied while the country was in lockdown”.

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Raab disdained this by praising the British people for their generosity towards Ukrainian refugees (a subject Rayner hadn’t mentioned, just as Starmer hadn’t mentioned it last week), saying that this was what the government was focused on “while she is in her social media echo chamber”.

It wasn’t a great parliamentary moment, but Rayner lost the expectations game. Boris Johnson has handled the detention of dual nationals in Iran badly, but today was not the time to point it out – especially when the government has negotiated a deal that not only secured the release of Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, but may even have made progress on the nuclear issue and on Iranian oil and gas exports.

Nor is it clear that Labour has a credible alternative policy to find sources of energy that are not tainted by murderous dictators. Johnson is just as keen on renewables as Labour is, and Labour is just as keen on nuclear power as he is.

The two absent protagonists will be happy with the way Prime Minister’s Questions went. Johnson because Rayner failed to dent the government, and Starmer because Rayner failed to live up to her reputation for outshining him in the Commons. After her overlong, flailing show of unconvincing indignation, many Labour MPs will, for once, be looking forward to having Starmer back next week.