‘Equally wooden’: Starmer and Truss do battle in first PMQs

The UK’s new prime minister Liz Truss went head to head with Labour leader Keir Starmer as the pair faced each other at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) for the first time.

It was a PMQs dominated by the energy crisis and tax cuts, as Truss ruled out introducing a windfall tax to fund a widely expected freeze on the energy price cap.

Clashing with Starmer, Truss said “we cannot tax our way to growth” as the Labour leader accused the new PM of “making hard-working people pay”, citing Treasury estimates that energy producers will make £170bn in excess profits over the next two years.

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Truss propped up by ‘wooden’ Starmer

If Truss was nervous on her first outing at the despatch box as prime minister, “she certainly did not show it”, said The Daily Telegraph, which assessed her performance as “assured” as she “calmly batted away” Starmer’s attack lines.

For Starmer, this “should have been easy”, wrote columnist Alice Thomson for The Times. Truss may have spent a decade at the despatch box honing her debating skills, “but for all her talents, the new prime minister is not a natural speaker”.

Luckily for the new PM, she faced an “equally wooden” performer in Keir Starmer, said Thomson, and managed to exceed the low expectations of many pundits and backbenchers. She even landed her first joke, after having it teed up by former prime minister Theresa May, quipping that not only was it the Tories who had produced three female leaders, but Labour couldn’t even find one “who doesn’t come from north London”.

Back to the ‘old dividing lines’

This week’s debate was certainly “more ideological and more enlightening” than we’ve been used to of late, said Sky News’s political editor Beth Rigby. Unlike the Commons clashes of Boris Johnson’s premiership, where the focus often tipped into trading “rhetorical blows and political attacks”, there seemed to be “genuine differences over policy and ideology”, said Rigby. It was “almost going back to the old dividing lines of the Conservatives versus Labour,” Rigby noted.

If there is one key takeaway from this week’s PMQs, it is that there is a “thick red dividing line” between Truss’s plan to “borrow [and] add debt to fund an energy package” to contend with the energy crisis, while Starmer would “fund one at least in part with a windfall tax on excess profits”, tweeted Kevin Maguire, the Daily Mirror’s associate editor.

Judging either Truss or Starmer on this first outing is “clearly ridiculous”, said the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason. But it is clear “how different” PMQs is likely to feel going forward, one which will demand a very different approach from Keir Starmer than the one he adopted with Boris Johnson. But in Truss, Starmer now faces “a very different opponent”.