Keir Starmer failed the noise test at Prime Minister’s Questions today. In the press gallery, much of his answer to Kemi Badenoch’s sixth and final question was inaudible.
Normally, this wouldn’t matter, because the microphones pick up what is said in the Commons and anyone watching on TV would have heard him perfectly clearly. But the noise matters to MPs in the chamber. Labour MPs were aware that their colleagues around them were mostly sitting in glum silence. Conservative MPs knew that their leader had skewered Starmer with each question, and were surprised and pleased that their shouts of derision were drowning out a prime minister mumbling his way through his prepared answers.
