PMQs sketch: Nothing’s funny about the economy, stupid
What’s the best way to wind up Rishi Sunak? Accuse him of wrecking the economy. It’s a particular sore point for the prime minister, a self-styled boy genius who lost the leadership election to the woman who actually wrecked the economy, Liz Truss.
But he would look like a real schmuck if he answered “it wasn’t me, it was the other one” everytime Keir Starmer bellowed at him about some poor sod in Selby whose kids would now have to share bedrooms because of the massive rise in mortgage repayments.
The “£2,900 a year Tory mortgage penalty” was a real gift to Keir Starmer, who spent today’s Prime Minister’s Question in his comfort zone – humourlessly lecturing us on just how dreadful everything is.
His only quip about Sunak’s “keen interest in Californian mortgages” surely fails to stand up to reality; Sunak, after all, is so rich he doesn’t need a mortgage to buy property.
While he avoided simply pointing at Liz Truss everytime he stood up, Sunak was still happy to deflect blame, pointing to rising inflation and interest rates across the world, a regular segment of British politics which has started to really irritate other world leaders trying to get their own voters to forget about how expensive everything is.
So irked was Sunak by a lawyer, of all people, trying to school him on the economy, he launched his own attack, yelling: “(Starmer) doesn’t have many policies but the ones he does have share one thing in common: they are dangerous, inflationary and working people will pay the price.”
Worse still than a lawyer is a doctor who couldn’t even do his own expenses bragging about the growth rate of the UK economy, just as homeowners are about to be hit with thousands of pounds of extra repayments.
You would be forgiven for thinking Dr Liam Fox was a secret Labour agent on the Conservative benches, but no, he really meant it when he asked: “Is it not time we had good news, talking Britain up?”