Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday felt like the overture to the main event later - a Commons showdown over Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan. That didn’t stop Sir Keir Starmer from hitting all the right notes in a merciless attack on Tory divisions undermining the PM.
The Labour leader said that “only this Government” could manage to send more Home Secretaries to Rwanda than actual migrants - and only they could have lost contact with some 4,250 people who were earmarked for removal under the contentious plan.
That figure emerged this week when Labour revealed in the Commons that the Home Office was no longer able to trace 85% of the 5,000 people identified for flights to Rwanda.
“When he sees his party tearing itself apart, hundreds of bald men scrapping over a single, broken comb, doesn’t he wish he’d had the courage to stick to his guns?” Sir Keir asked, recalling reports that as Chancellor, Mr Sunak had objected to the Rwanda plan.
Even Tory backbenchers chortled at that one - and there were wry smiles too when the PM touted his record on inflation, hours after an unwelcome and unexpected rise in consumer prices to 4.0% last month.
Mr Sunak had some tunes of his own, reprising his latest line of attack that a Labour victory in this year’s General Election would take Britain “back to square one”, and highlighting Sir Keir’s long career as a criminal barrister.
The PM waved a pamphlet on European human rights law authored by Sir Keir when he was a working lawyer - earning a rebuke from the Speaker for bringing a prop to the chamber - and said that his past clients had included the newly banned Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
"When I see a group chanting 'jihad' on our streets I ban them," Mr Sunak told the Commons. "He [Starmer] invoices them."
Insisting that Labour has no plan itself to tackle the boatloads of migrants crossing the Channel, the PM added: “He doesn’t actually care about this problem…. It’s because he has no values, no convictions.” Sir Keir branded the attacks “absolutely pathetic”.
After his PMQs mauling, Mr Sunak was braced for a crunch vote later on the Rwanda scheme. The indications were that it will pass the Third Reading vote, but some 60 Tory MPs rebelled on Tuesday, and plenty of them will continue to sing from a different hymn sheet as the election nears.
