'Lame duck' Starmer defends his legacy as Burnham shuns PMQs | The Daily T

The UK is being held hostage by lame duck Keir Starmer.Meanwhile, the real prime minister is missing in action.

Andy Burnham evades PMQ and won't let us know what he's going to do about the government's shoddy defence plan.

For the Labour Party to do this to us, to hold us hostage while it pauses for many weeks, months in fact.to figure out how to run the government that it currently already occupies is cruel to the public.I just want Bernard to be Prime Minister right now so that I can ask him questions, because he'll then have to take questions at a press conference, and I can actually find out where my country's going to be in September.

Tim, this podcast is going out at 5pm.What else is happening today?

Er, Spectator Garden Party.

And what else is happening today?

England are playing Ivory Uruguay Panama.

It's three letters.

Oh.

If I start singing a 1980s fruit juice drink.

OK, right.It's it's the DRC.

Yes, it is.

Right.

And it kicks off when?

Umbongo in the Congo.

It's the Umbongo song for anyone born I suppose before 1985.

Yeah.I don't know if you could get away with that now.

No, I don't.

I don't know what time it is.

It's at five.So we are simultaneously going out with the football.Can I suggest that people listening and watching this just double screen it.And then you can have fun listening to political insight while hopefully watching England be victorious.Because do you know what happens if we lose today?

What happens if we lose today?We lose the cup.

What?

We have to hand the cup.What are you talking about?I assume it's like in school football we have a cup somewhere in a glass case.We lose the cup.

This isn't cup final Tim, we're out of the group stage.

I was going to say, deal with it.done very well.

We're now in the knockout stage.So if we lose today...

But you need to collect points.It's like Green Shield Stamps.

You needed to collect points in the group stage.Now you just need to win your match to get through to the next stage.And obviously we're going to quarters, semis and the actual final.OK?

OK.But with Germany now out...

Oh, hello!

I know that because our new owner Yes.It spoke to us yesterday.Yes.

We were bought yesterday, weren't we, by Axial Springer.That's right.And we heard from Matthias Doffner, who is our new big boss.And we heard from our new CEO.And it's all changed here at The Telegraph, but in a very positive fashion.

Oh, we're very excited about it.I'm surprised Nigel Farage didn't put a bid in.

Yes, that's right.

Because I feel like he's got the money.

He's got some money, apparently from gold bullion.Now, I appreciate my other employer, GB News, does quite a few gold adverts.I'm not sure if there's a correlation there.Should I put myself forward?I could sell gold and elasticated trousers, mono -slippers.

Yes, it is. I'm a fan of GB News ads.Our customers are always surprised at the money they can get for their old gold and bits of jewellery.I know.And then there's a shot of a woman going, how much?

That's right.I tell you what, when I think of Tim Stanley, I think of a lot of gold jewellery.I think of medallions.I think of signet rings.Yes.I think of how you look at home in Kent.

I also love the ad of the fat people who've lost weight.

Yes.Hiya.

She always aims it that way.And there's one man who says something like, like, I lost weight to spend more time with my family.What were you doing when you were fat?

Just spending a hell of a lot of time eating, I think is the answer to that question.Look, we'll get on to the Farage bashing in just a minute, because PMQs wouldn't be the same without a little go at the reform leader.And we will get into the to and fro between Starmer and Badenock over the defence spending plan.There was a there was arunning joke against the Liberal Democrats throughout the entirety of PMQs which I personally really enjoyed and so did most of the parliamentarians and it started with a response to a question about why Frimley Park Hospital was being built on the site of a golf course.

He's urged his constituents to oppose it because, quote, this is his quote, if the hospital goes ahead there will be no golf course.So Labour building new hospitals, he's standing up for golf courses.I can't think of anything more Lib Dem.

It was the funniest thing the Prime Minister ever said.And Kemi Badenoch picked up on it.

Thank you, Mr Speaker.And can I associate myself and this side of the House with the Prime Minister's comments about Venezuela and also about the Lib Dems?

And later on, ever the clown, Ed Davey got in on the joke too.

Thank you, Mr Speaker.Can I not associate myself with the Prime Minister's comments about my party?

Tim will get onto Ed Davey's quite typical attack on reform and then the subsequent attack on Nigel Farage personally in a moment.But the to and fro over defence, it was predictable she was going to do that because overnight it's emerged that there's a five billion pound black hole in this plan that hasn't been accounted for.So Kemi wanted to make it very clear that for all of the bluster and the boasting of the prime minister when he unveiled this plan yesterday, actually it appears to be full of holes.and, importantly, military top brass do not support it.

Let me tell him what Lord Richard Dannett, the former head of the army, said yesterday.He said the prime minister had chosen the cheap option and called the plan woefully inadequate.Let me tell him what General Sir Richard Barron, one of the authors of his own strategic plan, said.Review, said yesterday.We are simply not going to be ready to defend this country properly.That's what they're saying.

Three weeks ago, the Defence Secretary resigned, saying, I am being forced to make decisions that would increase the risk to personnel on operations and could make the country less safe.Since that letter, the Prime Minister has only increased spending by 0 .01%.We can count, the generals can count, the Kremlin can count.His plan doesn't add up.How can the Prime Minister possibly stand there and say that this is enough?Since the Prime Minister took office, Poland has increased their funding to 4 .8%, Germany has increased theirs to 3 .7%.

This year, Russia will spend 10 % of GDP on defence, meanwhile Britain is spending it all on welfare.Even the limited plan that he has announced has completely unraveled because he hasn't found the money to pay for it.It is £5 billion short.

But the Prime Minister was able to reply, I'm sorry but the Tories do not have a leg to stand on when it comes to defence.

All people who know what's in the plan and welcome it contrast that Mr Speaker with their record in government because they hollowed out the armed forces.Their record is cutting defence spending.My record is raising it to £300 billion and rising.Their record is cutting frigates by a quarter.Cutting mine hunters by a half.and leaving 47 of 49 defence programmes delayed or over budget.

My record is the biggest boost to defence investment since the 1980s.Their record is missing army recruitment targets every year for 14 years.We've given our armed force the biggest pay rise for 20 years and increased defence funding by £15 billion a year.That's a record I'm proud to stand on.

And actually Tim, he was very effective in his closing remarks, summing up why the Conservatives were basically being hypocrites about this whole issue.And I actually thought he spoke very powerfully.There is an extent to which he is a bit demob happy and just pushing the boundaries of his own comfort zone.

out the armed forces.That's what the Defence Secretary admitted that's what they did.They don't like it.They won't defend their record Mr Speaker because they can't.They won't apologise for it, because I have to admit what we all know, it's a total failure.They just try to pretend the 14 years they were in power never really happened.

We're in power, we've record investment in defence and security, I'm proud of this Labour government.

But Baidnock cleverly pushed it forward to what does Andy Burnham think?

So I will ask again, because he didn't answer the question, Mr Speaker, did the Member for Makefield know that he was going to have to find £5 billion for the Prime Minister's plan?

Notably, that was a question that he refused to answer.And of course, he can't answer it.Everyone in the press lobby is signed to ask, where is the member for Makerfield?

Yeah, was he there today?

No, he wasn't.

Oh, that's strange.

I presume he's in Manchester where he's announced he's going to set up his own number 10 so he doesn't even have to leave his front room to run the country.But we always used to complain that MPs don't spend enough time in their own constituency.But in this case, it'd be quite nice to see him in Parliament for a little while.But it is becoming odd.There is no topoints to the strange vacuum in British leadership right now.

Yes.

For example, there was a question at the end by Alex Davis -Jones.

She used to be a minister.She resigned over Starmer.

She resigned.She's wearing a very nice sort of parakeet yellow dress.She's the MP for Pontypridd.There we go.And she asked about, could you commit to an inquiry into the Epstein scandal?And notably, the prime minister didn't.

Well, he didn't because he can't.He can't make these commitments.Now, when it comes to the defence spending, The reason why, part of the reason why this is so controversial is the opposition is being expected to hold to account a government that will be gone in three weeks.

Yes, a government that can't hold itself to account right now.

So that government has made commitments for a future government that are not actually yet spent.So this is where the five billion comes into.What the government has done is it has said, we will spend 15 billion, but of that five billion, is £5 billion that someone in the future will have to find.

Now the Prime Minister's defence to that is we identified £22 billion worth of fiscal headroom in the last budget that allows us to do that.It used to be a black hole, didn't it?Now it's become a fiscal headroom.A black hole has become fiscal headroom.Yes.But having said all that, and I wish Badenock had perhaps tried to interrogate this point, I've got a feeling that they've already spent that £22 billion worth of headroom 22 times actually Tim.

But while they are promising Future spending that they've not yet committed and explained where it will come from from a future prime minister whose opinions are about all of this We don't really know no They're also trying to get defense to commit to 11 billion pounds worth of savings Yes, now that will come from some stuff that in a way you should save so such as old weapon system You're no longer going to keep right other stuff will come from things which are very controversial like mod housing for soldiersRight. That'sRight.That's going to anyone where that was going to be in their constituency, anyone who gets a letter from a veteran, anyone that's going to become very controversial.But the point is, is it is true.The government wants to be able to say we're spending.

This is the largest uptick in spending since the Cold War.And overall, we're spending close to 300 billion pounds on defense.But if it's being found from uncommitted future spending, And if it's being found from savings in other areas, then I think one could legitimately ask, have you, Keir Starmer, as your legacy, really handed over that pot of committed money to Andy Burnham?And on top of that, in order to fund it, they've also made savings from other departments which are controversial within government.So immediately after PMQs, Hamish Faulkner was standing up to talk about Israel.

He's the foreign office minister.

Foreign office minister.Well, there is a road in his constituency that's been desperate for an upgrade for a very long time and he's annoyed that it looks like some of these savings will be coming from the road budget.

who frankly can just dole out cash that comes from central government and everyone's a winner.Yes.This is the difficult choices he's going to have to make.And Badenoch is very much positioning herself as the party of warfare versus welfare.And I sort of saw kind of into the future at today's PMQs because even somebody stopped me on the tube today on the way here.loves the podcast obviously, loves the Daily T, that was good to hear.

A couple of people came up to me at Marylebone station and said the same.And they said, how do you think PMQs is going to play out between Badenock and Burnham?And they made the point that if Burnham plays Mr. Nice Guy, it's going to be quite difficult perhaps for the opposition leader to handle.So what's she going to do, turn his niceness against him, say that he's being too kind andtherefore won't... scrap welfare and will lean into a socialist agenda that only suits the left and start making about shirkers and workers.But then, of course, she then turns into the nasty party again.

So the dynamics of it are all quite difficult.It's almost easier for her to deal with Starmer because of his propensity to mansplain, sound pretty annoying and follow the process.She's faced with some eyelash fluttering maverick who starts telling jokes in the house.I mean, listen, she can do dry humour.

Yes.

She isn't, you know, we're not kind of stitching up our sides and remembering Jasper Carrott when she's at the bloody despatch box.So I think it's going to be a little bit tricky, but I just feel that that's now going to be the fault line.We discussed this earlier in the week.The Burnham versus Baidnock is going to be about high tax versus low tax, high spend versus low spend.Austerity, he will claim, they will claim efficiency, and in general, socialism versus capitalism.That's how it's going to break down.

There is a Teflon quality to Andy Burnham, but there isn't a Teflon quality to our country.which has several major problems that require painful decisions to fix.I mean, you've identified a key one, the overspend on welfare and the underspend on defence.So he's going to have to make choices that will end up annoying someone.When you're a regional mayor, as Ben Houchen was explaining, you either spend the money or if you're not given the money, you protest about not having the money.You can't do that when you're prime minister.

What's he going to do?Is he going to appear on the cameras and say he's angry with himself for failing to invest?

I was at that U .S.Embassy 250th anniversary party last night.Right.

That's at the American Revolution.

Yes, indeed.And it's a wonderful event at Winfield House, which is in Regents Park.It's gorgeous.They bring out all of these kind of, everything that the Americans make from kind of Hershey bars to Coca -Cola to Jack Daniels to Five Guys is all there.There's stalls ofyou can go mad and I was hobnobbing with various different people, cravenly looking for stories because that's how I rock.

Had a poke bowl and a pink lemonade and left.But the point is I did speak to a former very senior Tory.

A poke bowl and a pink lemonade.

I know.

That's the modern night out, isn't it?

Isn't it just?It's actually fun spongery on a new level.But anyway, you know I'm on a special diet and all that nonsense.But the point is, I spoke to a very senior former... cabinet minister, okay, on the Tory side.And I said, Well, you were there you were in opposition when Tony Blair was in government.What do you remember of Andy Burnham?

And he said, unless he's had his head changed, he is unable to decide anything ever.He's totally indecisive.And I thought, God, this is reminding me of somebody else that once was a metropolitan mayor, who is great on rhetoric and, you know, popular in the pub.You can come out with some good speeches, Boris Johnson, but quite difficult to pin down on anything.

Yes.Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tricky.

Burnham also is investing heavily in nice, but much of the country has turned nasty.

Yes.

A point that was raised by Ed Davey.There is a question every week about how evil reform are.It usually comes from Ed Davey.It's tedious.It's done purely so that he can have a TikTok clip of him slagging off reform.

And here it is. I was talking to a British friend of Indian ancestry who told me how reform activists came to her door and said that if they get into power she and her family will have their passports seized and their citizenship revoked.Does the Prime Minister agree that racism has no place in our country and will he join me in condemning anyone who is racist?it?

Having said that, Keir Starmer also doesn't mind having a pop at Nigel Farage, and he did that in response to a question by Farage's colleague, Lee Anderson.

He likes to ask questions.He should be asking some questions of the leader of his party sitting next to him.He received £5 million from a crypto billionaire and then privately lobbied the Bank of England on digital currencies.So did their leader carry out lobbying paid?Why did he keep his £5 million gift secret?And are they happy with their leader earning £20 ,000 an hour flogging gold bullion?

They need to ask the questions across their benches, but they never do.

Although Farage has been slightly lesser spotted, notwithstanding his rare appearance in the chamber today.

And writing for the Telegraph.Thank you very much, Nigel.Thank you very much.Excellent piece.

Always take your copy.Reform demands election if Burnham raises taxes to fund defence.Now this is quite a good political strategy because so far all of the Burnham briefings have been he's going to stick with the manifesto and famously the manifesto said it wouldn't raise personal taxes, so income tax, VAT or employee national insurance.We can have a row about whether they broke that with the employer national insurance hike, but of course they did.But they say they haven't.So he's saying if he honours that manifesto then he has the mandate because he's just inherited the manifesto from the previous prime minister and he'll carry it forward and therefore we don't need a general election.

Farage is saying but hang on a minute if you put up those taxes then you've breached your own manifesto pledge, and therefore we need to take this to the country.That's an interesting strategy from reform, isn't it?Because I'm not sure they're ready for a general election.I think the only party that might be is Labour.So he wants a general election now, even though they're going backwards in the polls.And at the moment, as far as the current figures are, where are we here?

YouGov?We've got reform on 25%, Labour and Tories on 20%, the rest, whatever.All that's going to happen if we have a general election now is a super -hung Parliament, right?

Yeah.Though it's almost worth having just to find out who reforms defence spokesman would be.

Yes, that's true.They haven't got one yet.

Currently have one.There's also some YouGov polling that suggests that all this focus on the North by which he means Manchester, might have backfired because only 23 % of Britons expect Burnham to govern in the interests of the whole country.27 % believe he will be governing mainly in the interests of regions like the North.Conservative reform voters, unsurprisingly, are least likely to think Burnham will govern in the interests of the whole country.Northerners say he would govern the whole country by 32 % to 13%, but they probably think the whole country is the North.And Southerners expect him to favour the North by 36 % to 18%.

That's so funny.So Burnham is actually creating a North -South divide in the interest of deep illusion.What is happening?We've also got some polling suggesting that those who voted for Labour in 2024 no longer want to do so.41 % of 2024 Labour voters will still back the party, so they've lost half of their franchise.More men than women back reform.

OK, that's not particularly surprising.Of those who own their home outright, 31 % would vote reform and 25 % would vote for the Conservatives.Oh, Lord alive, Tim.Here it is. 39 % of 18 to 24 -year -olds back the Greens, as do 33 % of 25 to 29 -year -olds, proving that youth and naivety is so dangerous in a democracy, isn't it?

There was a time when the young voted Conservative.You've got to make the argument to young people.And right now, the pitch is all aimed at old people.It's all about triple locks and winter fuel payments.

Well, the other reason why they want to vote for the Greens, of course,is that Zak Polanski would like to tax the rich more.Now, I'm not sure that is the best.

I think it's a lot to do with Israel, actually.

Well, it's probably got a lot to do with Israel.

I think on campuses, Gaza really is the preeminent issue.

Also, it might have things to do with support for non -binary and goodness knows what else, right?Yeah.Legislating pink hair.

And a lot of young voters, like a lot of everyone else, assume the Green Party is motivated by ecological issues.This is what the evidence from focus groups is.If you put the Green Party to people, they do just think, oh, that's a nice party that wants to clean up the rivers and things like that.So there still is that misunderstanding going on.

And do you know where that's going to get them, Tim, by the way, all this wishful thinking about taxing the rich?Well, it's just going to cause rich people to leave this country.And apparently, according to UBS, The average Britain's wealth has fallen by more than a fifth over the last five years.Isn't that wonderful?So of the 37 countries it surveyed, typical wealth has fallen by around £28 ,500 since 2020, after accounting for inflation.It's left the median adult with assets of just over £95 ,500 last year, making the British a touch richer than the French, but poorer than the Dutch and the Italians.

This is the real challenge facing the next Prime Minister.It's not do people in Manchester feel government is closer to them, it's that across the entire country, people's wealth has fallen as a consequence of Covid, Ukraine and inflation.

That's right.Keir Starmer said, I'm very proud that I'm going to be leaving the country in a better place.You're not going to be leaving our finances in a better state, personal or public.

And perhaps he cannot be blamed for those, he likes to say, global headwinds.And he can't be blamed for that.But of course, he needs to come up with the policies that ameliorate that.But also, you have to do something more than just constantlyreorganize your government.grow the economy, as they keep saying.

And improve the lot of the British public.

Yes.All of these polls right now are irrelevant until we get a new Prime Minister and until we see something of him so that we can then judge what we really think of him.And while watching this PMQs, it occurred to me, I feel like I'm handcuffed to Akir Starmer at the moment.

What a thought.In a small lift.

Right.While eating pickled onion crisps.Oh my goodness.There's a real sense of discomfort at being stuck with this man.Because Starmer has given himself this four week period in which he gets to say goodbye.As I wrote, his political death is lasting longer than Madame Butterfly on the stage.

That's right.

My theory is he's hoping that England win the football in that period.So he leaves behind this legacy.And failing that, I don't know if Croft is in this period, but if some English terrier could win a category there, so he's got that to claim, that would be good.So he's given himself four weeks, but also, once those are up, it then tips into the summer holiday, because MPs get a very long summer holiday, like other children, which starts to look like a presidential -style transition period.We don't normally do this.No, we don't need it.

Now, the only reason why we might justify it, a bit like we were saying earlier, Andy Burnham avoiding PMQs, and indeed the Commons, We might we might justify it by saying, well, it's special because there's an incumbent PM and people are going to point at him and laugh.With Burnham, we can justify this transition phase because he's not been an MP for nine years.Yes.And so he's got to be trained up in that.It's like a T -level test.Yeah, that's right.

He's got to be trained up in that period, which just reminds us how unusual and how much of a gamble this is on the part of Labour.It is, I just can't think of an occasion, except in the past where like Alec Douglas Hume comes from the Lords or something, when we have just said, we'll bring someone in to do it, and we'll have to train them up.So in the meantime, we're stuck with Starmer.and watching PMQs where he's unable to give definitive answers to questions.He's unable to make pledges.He's setting spending projections that he's not actually paying for.

You realize that for these four weeks, we are chained to a lame duck government.Dead duck.A dead duck government.

Yeah.

What's the point of that?

I don't know.

And as someone who has to cover it, I can tell you, it gives you a certain sense of despair because we all emotionally...It's like a groundhog day.Well, when Burnham won Makerfield, was delighted.There was a sense of emotional release, not because he won, but because something was happening in politics again.There was movement.We knew what our future would look like.

Because remember, we'd had weeks and weeks of people resigning and protesting.And then suddenly everything stops.And we, the country, and we as a society, and I do believe Britain is a traumatised country after Covid and Ukraine, racism, Brexit, all the things that have happened to us.We're a traumatised country.

Makes it.

Makes it.And I do think that for the Labour Party to do this to us, to hold us hostage while it pauses for many weeks, months in fact, to figure out how to run the government that it currently already occupies is cruel to the public.I just want Bernie to be Prime Minister right now so that I can ask him questions, because he'll then have to take questions at a press conference, and I can actually find out where my country's going to be in September, because I don't know.

But can I make a couple of observations?First of all, this isn't going to change because Keir Starmer will follow the programmeat all costs.Second of all, I love this idea that you're going to get any greater clarity with Andy Burnham than you have with Keir Starmer, two men whose ideology is literally built on sand, shifting sand.Third of all, I love this optimism that you think anything's going to change.This guy's coming down from Manchester like, as we've discussed, he's not the next Messiah.

I'm surprised he hasn't announced some kind of Forrest Gump style walk from Canal Street to Downing Street, like giving people high fives on the M6 and beyond.Honestly, this is absolutely...

He's going to come running in like sports aid, isn't he, with giant banners hanging over him saying, welcome to London, Andy.

To the strains of some Oasis song in a bucket hat and inappropriately tiny shorts.

I'm not saying things are going to change.My point is simply, I would like to talk to the person in charge.I'm stuck right now talking to a flunky in consumer relations.

We can't do this.

And I'm shouting down the phone, I want to speak to your line manager.This is my point is we cannot psychologically move on.because Keir Starmer has decided, randomly, even though the next Prime Minister has already been elected by Makefield and no one's running against him, he has decided, I'm going to sit here for four weeks and have four more of these PMQs, at which he performs woefully and can't say anything of any interest.

I'm going to cheer you up now, because you want to see leadership?Go watch Harry Kane.And we will be back, hopefully with good news from the football and from the world of politics, 5pm tomorrow.

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