PMQs review: Is Kemi Badenoch getting her strategy from the Two Ronnies?

It is with some regret that we must inform you there is now another Brandreth popping up on BBC TV, talking rubbish in exchange for attention and perhaps the occasional chuckle.

This one, however, is not Gyles – novelty knitwear wearer, former Tory MP and whip, now seen on The One Show interviewing the sort of people who’ve been using the same iron for 65 years. The new Brandreth is his daughter, the splendidly-named Aphra, who was elected Conservative MP for Chester South and Eddisbury last year. She is a former London councillor and, unlike Dad, who voted to Remain, a woman determined to keep alive the Brexit wars.

“With the so-called EU-UK reset summit less than two weeks away,” she asked Keir Starmer in PMQs today, emphasising the “so-called” although that’s what it is, “will the prime minister reassure the House that he will not hand over any British sovereign powers, particularly the hard-won controls over our UK fishing waters, in backroom deals with Brussels?”

Control over fishing waters is not a touchstone issue in Chester South and Eddisbury – although the River Dee is home to wild brown trout and grayling, it is rarely troubled by French trawlers – so it is fair to assume that this was an early salvo in the coming battle over Sir Keir’s reset. Any compromise will be seen as a betrayal.

“We will act only, as we always do, in the national interest,” said the PM. “We have secured a very good deal with India, we are talking to the US and we are going for a reset with the EU to boost our economy.” He might have added “one of these has just potentially started the third world war and the other is determined to decimate our film industry, so let’s hope the third works out”, but didn’t.

We start with Brandreth rather than Kemi Badenoch as the action at the top of the bill failed to spark. Last week, the Tory leader might have been expected to lead on Tony Blair’s rather ill-timed pre-local election criticism of Labour’s net zero policy, but didn’t. Turned out the arch-strategist Badenoch had been keeping it in her back pocket for a whole week later when the local elections were over and everybody had forgotten Blair had said anything, let alone what it was. Clever Kemi!

Sometimes it seems her strategy guide is not The Art of War but that Two Ronnies sketch in which a Mastermind contestant answers the previous question.

“This approach to net zero is ‘irrational’; it is ‘doomed to fail’,” said Badenoch. “Those aren’t my words; they are Tony Blair’s.” (“Aaaaaaaaaah!” chorused Tory MPs at Badenoch’s seven-days-late zinger). “If the prime minister wants to throw words about, he should speak to him. The truth is that the prime minister is on another planet!”.

Starmer, who frequently gives the impression in PMQs that he wishes he were on another planet, preferred to quote the many times that Badenoch, when in government, had spoken in favour of renewable energy (“It’s long-term investment in nuclear and renewables that will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and keep down consumer costs”). Kemi looked annoyed. Didn’t he know she wasn’t running for leader of the Conservatives then?

And that was largely that. Elsewhere, Lib Dem leader Ed Davey went all Pastor Niemöller in his latest salvo at President Trump, this time at the leader of the free world’s back-of-a-fag-packet scheme to impose tariffs on foreign films.

“First, he came for our steelworkers and our car makers with his outrageous tariffs,” he said. “Now, Donald Trump is coming for our world-leading British film industry. Will the prime minister work with our allies in Europe and the Commonwealth and make it clear to President Trump that if he picks a fight with James Bond, Bridget Jones and Paddington Bear, he will lose?”.

An unamused Starmer trotted out his usual line about the false equivalence of choosing between the EU and US. Alongside him, Angela Rayner and Jonathan Reynolds laughed. Opposite, Badenoch appeared to ponder whether this Paddington chap (Peruvian immigrant, asylum status unknown) was “one of us”.

Finally, Starmer’s weirdest answer came to the penultimate question, from Labour’s Torcuil Crichton (Na h-Eileanan an Iar). Crichton was worried about reports that the Press Association, which covers parliamentary proceedings, “may cut back its dawn-to-dusk coverage through redundancies”. There is nothing MPs like less than the thought that their words may not be assiduously covered by the world’s media.

“Across the world, journalists risk their lives, and lose their lives, doing what they do best: independently pursuing the truth,” said the prime minister. “On many occasions I have been at award ceremonies, usually on a yearly basis, where the names of those journalists who have lost either their lives or their freedom is read out, and it is always a humbling reminder of the really important work that they do.”

Which, those remaining hacks in the gallery of the House may have noted, was an answer to a completely different question. Many parliamentary journalists, of course, have risked, and indeed lost, their lives down the years – but the culprits were usually Rothmans and Watneys Red Barrel.