A remarkable thing happened at Sir Keir Starmer’s first appearance for Prime Minister’s Questions as PM on Wednesday.
Not that we knew it at the time, but the last time he faced off against Rishi Sunak for PMQs on May 22, the Conservative leader was about to call a snap election.
This time, Mr Sunak had to speak from the Opposition benches after he mislaid more than 240 Tory MPs in the election. He ruefully joked that Team GB didn’t need to take advice from him about winning at the soon-to-start Paris Olympics.
Given the crushing rebuke just given by the electorate, Mr Sunak clearly felt it was not right to go after Labour so early in the new Government’s life. Instead, sombrely, he stressed cross-party unity on Ukraine.
There were no quips, no attack lines, none of the knockabout that normally defines PMQs.
Sir Keir was reeling. How to respond to this sudden civility? Clearly, he had come in expecting a different tack from the Opposition leader, and he gamely insisted that Labour’s job was to “fix the mess of the last 14 years”.
But the PM’s heart didn’t appear to be in it. His big pitch, heard anew in the chamber on Wednesday, is that Labour is “serious” about governing after the near-farce seen in recent years in Westminster.
Behind him, there was little of the usual PMQs raucousness seen in that long stretch of Tory rule. The 400-plus Labour MPs were largely content to signal their disagreement with those opposite quietly, rather than braying it.
SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn earned a rebuke from the Speaker for waving a newspaper front page showing former Labour PM Gordon Brown, ahead of the election, calling for an end to child poverty.
SNP MP Pete Wishart demanded to know whether the Labour rebellion showed the “honeymoon’s over before it’s even begun”.
But the SNP also has to face up to the fact that voters in Scotland no longer love it quite so much.
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey got to ask the questions reserved for the third-party leader, focussing on the plight of carers.
Mr Flynn spoke from a position reserved for minor leaders, at the head of his newly shrunken caucus of nine MPs.
There was laughter as he congratulated Labour for “ending Tory rule”, prompting a Conservative MP to heckle “and yours!" Glancing at his new Tory neighbours on the Opposition benches, Mr Flynn quipped “they’re too close for comfort now”.
The Labour leader had the last laugh as he gazed across to Mr Sunak, with potential Tory successor James Cleverly sitting beside him, chuntering away.
While Mr Cleverly is urging civility in the coming Tory leadership race, Suella Braverman (fresh from endorsing Donald Trump for US president) wants a diet of Right-wing red meat.
For Sir Keir, it is all reminiscent of Labour’s internecine battles after its defeats in the 2010s.
He advised the party opposite that “when you get rejected that profoundly by the electorate, it's best not to go back to the electorate and tell them that they were wrong”.
“It's best to reflect and change your approach,” he said. Mr Sunak has taken that on board. Others on his side, less so.
