Does our technocrat PM believe he is above politics?

Keir Starmer’s growing impatience with the House of Commons suggests that, having come late to politics, he thinks he is better than those who have spent their lives doing nothing but politics, says John Rentoul

Keir Starmer faced a grilling at Wednesday’s PMQs (House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA Wire)

Keir Starmer didn’t answer Rishi Sunak’s first question any of the three times he asked it. Will he publish the assessment that must have been carried out by civil servants of the impact of cutting the pensioners’ winter fuel payment?

The prime minister said “the fact of the matter is” that the Conservatives left a £22bn black hole, and that Sunak ought to apologise before “he complains about us clearing up his mess”.

The second time, Starmer said: “I remember the days when the Conservative Party was concerned about balancing the books.” The third time, he accused Sunak of pretending that everything is fine, which was why his party was now sitting on the opposition side of the Commons.

This week’s Prime Minister’s Questions was not a comfortable experience for Labour MPs, still smarting from the painful experience of having to vote the day before to take money away from some pensioners who could ill afford it.

But it was revealing of Starmer’s impatience with the theatre of politics. He seems to think that, because he came late to politics, he is better than people who have done nothing but politics all their lives. He genuinely seems to believe that, while he is serious about dealing with the country’s problems, his opponents are using those problems as an excuse for playing politics.

When Sunak changed the subject for the remainder of his six questions, Starmer’s answers were again revealing. Sunak asked a technical question, demanding an “independent process” for deciding whether quality farmland should be used for solar power. Starmer was obviously not aware of the detail, but he was completely confident that competence would conquer all. “Of course we’ll get the balance right,” he said.

He was certain that if only he, a serious person with experience outside politics, applied himself to problems, they would be solved. That certainty shone through many of his answers in the rest of PMQs. Ed Davey, for the Liberal Democrats, asked about NHS cancer targets. This was a “very serious issue”, said Starmer, and a “very serious failure by the last government”. The new government, he said, had started work on putting it right.

Even Nigel Farage’s question about early prisoner releases being evidence of “two-tier policing” elicited a technocratic response. Instead of engaging with the two-tier point, Starmer was animated by the Tories’ negligence in allowing the prisons to overflow. He quoted the leaked letter from Alex Chalk, the Conservative justice secretary, a few days before the election, warning Sunak of the risk of delaying action any further. “What did he do? He delayed and increased the risks.”

Starmer seemed sincerely offended by the failure to sort out an urgent administrative problem.

The same attitude was shown in answers to other questions. One from Neil Hudson, the Conservative MP for Epping Forest, about hospitals in his constituency, produced a promise to put the previous government’s hospital-rebuilding programme on a “sustainable, deliverable basis”.

A question from Ann Davies, Plaid Cymru MP for Caerfyrddin, about “undergrounding” electricity cables instead of putting them on cheaper pylons, prompted Starmer to declare that he was “absolutely committed to the transition to renewable energy” – which wasn’t an answer, but it sounded very definite, and it seemed to take for granted that if reasonable people had a reasonable discussion about it, they would be able to agree the right policy.

The prime minister’s emphatic certainty is enough to get him through interrogation in the Commons for the moment. It is enough to say that the previous government left things in a terrible state – with a “£22bn black hole” – which is why it lost the election, and that the new government has started the work of fixing the foundations.

But it is storing up trouble for the future, when it turns out that everything cannot be a priority and not everything can be fixed, because sometimes there are no obvious right answers. Sometimes, people need politicians to lead and persuade them, and not just technocrats who had careers before politics to tell them that the solution is obvious and will be implemented shortly.