To say that there has been a sea-change in the environment in the Chamber is something of an understatement. The Labour benches are taken up with self-positioning for preferment under the Member for Makerfield’s likely new Ministry, while the Tories are obviously saving their most explosive ammunition for the time when the King of the North will become the target for that ammo.
Wednesday 24th June
PMQs, coming some 50 hours after the Prime Minister’s announcement of his resignation continued the end-of-term feeling (that will soon engulf schoolchildren across the country too!)
Sadly, the first use of “at pace” in this PMQ was recorded by Lee Barron (Corby & East Northamptonshire, Labour) at 12:03, which must be some sort of record.
The Leader of the Opposition kicked off, understandably, on Defence Spending, before heading off on a Rachel Reeves diversion following the Chancellor’s appearance in the new Member for Makerfield’s Westminster Hall welcome photocall.
Mrs Badenoch’s best line was a pithy encapsulation of the Tory theme in this almost-post-Starmer moment: “If it’s all so fantastic, why is he resigning?”
After a quick bash at the mortally-wounded and apparently not exactly cheerful Chancellor, Mrs Badenoch cycled through the Usual Suspects, Ed “Loyalty” Miliband (Doncaster North, Labour) EngSec and Bridget “Spiteful Class Warrior” Phillipson (Houghton & Sunderland South, Labour) EduSec. This almost knocked the Prime Minister off his celebratory stride by forcing him to defend ministers who had so conspicuously failed to back him.
It is interesting to note that Sir Keir’s defence of Mrs Phillipson was “The Education Secretary grew up in poverty” before segueing in to a lump-in-the-throat panegyric about social mobility, thus confirming that it is the outgoing Prime Minister’s view that it does not really matter if you are wrong or right: if you come from poverty, your errors are uncriticisable. Good to know. (For reference the DfE’s own figures reveal that there were 1,907 fewer full-time equivalent teachers in 2025/6 466,372, compared to 468,279 in 2024/5.)
There will be those who feel and probably say that Badenoch hit too personally and too hard (there was a lugubrious Speaker intervention when the Leader of the Opposition said that the Prime Minister had 400 knives in his back) But tt was all quite fun and, if anything, tactically, the Conservatives will have to become more personalised and more detailed on policy failures as the Burnham ministry takes over Starmer’s “nice but dull” mantel. Given the Prime Minister’s imminent departure, it was perhaps not surprising that there was more amusement than illumination in the Chamber.
Tuesday 23rd June
After what must have been a very jolly Cabinet Meeting, Treasury Questions allowed the House to enjoy the spectacle of an outgoing Chancellor insisting that things were all absolutely fine.
Rachel Reeves (Leeds West & Pudsey, Labour) ChExchq, is still super-confident that the DIP will be published before the NATO Summit in Ankara on 7th July, presumably because now the DIP can be published and then immediately recalled and revised by her successor in office.
However, to share the love, the Chancellor is really, really sure that her “careful, targeted action through the Great British Summer Savings package which launches on Thursday and which will reduce VAT on family summer activities so that adventure parks, soft play centres, cinemas and theatres will be cheaper” will fix everything. Surely there has never been a finer fin de siècle deployment of the “panem et circenses” strategy. Cost of Living crisis? Have a cheap swim in the Lido courtesy of Nurse Rache. Breathtakingly absurd and worthy of Monty Python.
The last Treasury Questions before the Summer hols means that thankfully this might be the last time the House has to endure Ms Reeves blend of strident cluelessness as Chancellor.
The day continued with an Opposition debate on the Defence Investment Plan, kicked off by James Cartlidge (South Suffolk, Conservative) Shadow DefSec, which centred on the inadequate funding highlighted by the resignations of the Defence Secretary and the Minister for the Armed Forces that had served as a prelude to the Prime Minister’s own post-Makerfield resignation, but the heat of that debate had been turned down somewhat by the prospect of a new Prime Minister installing a new Defence Secretary with the real chance of a distinctively revised DIP.
Nevertheless, Dame Harriet Baldwin (West Worcestershire, Conservative) got to the political issue underlying HM Treasury’s blockage of extra spending in the proposed DIP asking: “If everything is so great, why has Lord Robertson described the Government’s situation as one of “corrosive complacency”?”
This is to become the Tories major attack line in coming weeks as they wait for the King of the North to select his entourage.
Monday 22nd June
It was unusual for the Prime Minister not to be in his place to welcome a newly-elected Labour member, but perhaps forgivably Sir Keir absented himself as the King of the North appeared to take the oath in the Chamber at 2:30pm after Lara Bird (Arbroath & Broughty Ferry, SNP) and Douglas Lumsden (Aberdeen South, Conservative.) Prize for wittiest heckle goes to Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West, Conservative) for “Rome is saved!” Of course Cicero did not end well.
The new Member for Arboath & Broughty Ferry crossed her fingers while she took the oath having prefaced already prefaced it with “I take this oath only so that I can serve the people of Arbroath & Broughty Ferry. My first allegiance is and always will be the sovereign people of Scotland” all of which seems a bit student hackery and suggests that Miss Pyla Lara Bird-Leakey (in which name she was called to the Bar in Middle Temple just 8 months ago) may have trouble identifying which bridges to cross and which bridges to burn at this early stage.
While the PM’s absence for the arrival of the new members was not unreasonable in the circumstances, his subsequent delegation of the Ministerial Statement on the G7 Summit in Évian to David Lammy (Tottenham, Labour) DeputyPM was less forgivable as Mr Lammy had not actually attended the shindig/meeting.
The Deputy Prime Minister understandably concentrated his panegyric on his absent master to his Foreign Policy successes. To be fair, he could not keep an entirely straight face.
As The Speaker commented as Mr Lammy sat down “Extra time was given because I thought we would have a lot more on the G7; I did not know the statement would be all policy. Not to worry” emphasising the slight end-of-term feel to the proceedings.
Mrs Badenoch put in a strong performance, saying “If Ministers are all living in la-la land, I am going to wake them up. They need to stop pretending that everything is fine, because it is not. Let me remind the Deputy Prime Minister that the Prime Minister is resigning because he failed on national security. He appointed a known security risk as our ambassador to Washington. He is destroying our energy security, which is national security, and he is refusing to fund the defence investment plan needed to keep our country safe.”
But the House has moved on and, as indeed she pointed out herself, most of the Labour benches are much more interested in trying to secure ministerial preferment than defend the past errors of their departing leader.
There was also a serious intervention on the topic of the proposed PATHWAY (The Puberty Suppression and Transitional Healthcare with Adaptive Youth Services) study that aims to determine how the NHS can best support children and young people attending gender services from Dr Caroline Johnson (Sleaford & North Hykeham) Shadow Health MoS and a consultant paediatrician asked “Where else would we give powerful drugs with potentially serious long-term consequences for a subjective condition that is likely to get better on its own?” and, perhaps more tellingly: “This Labour Government think that 14 is too young to watch social media. Why do they think 11 is old enough for this trial?”
New Health Secretary James Murray (Ealing North, Labour) seemed not entirely convinced by the need for the PATHWAYS study himself, but concluded that he had agreed to allow it to proceed on the basis that he had “…received reassurances about there being the highest possible level of scrutiny and protection from harm for young people involved in the trial, and that is the basis on which, on balance, I think it is right for it to proceed.” The Health Secretary’s own very lukewarm support suggests that this is the wrong decision and should be reversed.
Thursday 18th June
Voters were marking their ballots in by-elections in Makerfield, Aberdeen South and Arbroath & Broughty Ferry but it seemed a shame that less than 30 Members were present in the Chamber to hear Mims Davies ‘s (East Grinstead & Uckfield, Conservative) Urgent Question asking the Home Secretary to make a statement on the progress made since the publication of Baroness Casey of Blackstock’s audit of group-based child sexual exploitation (“The Grooming Gangs”) a year ago.
Baroness Casey had warned (Baroness Casey of Blackstock, The Times, 16th June 2026, “Grooming gang victims failed by Whitehall box-ticking”) that child rape victims still have criminal convictions linked to their ordeals that have not been quashed. Police still do not have mandatory access to children’s services records, which leaves victims at risk. Whitehall officials engage in “box ticking”, but do not actually tackle the issue. Recommendations are accepted in full, action is promised. And then, slowly, it all goes quiet.
In response, Sarah Jones (Croydon West, Labour) Policing Minister, said that the work of the Statutory Independent Inquiry chaired by Baroness Longfield CBE had been underway since April, but as it has up to three years to produce a final report one may guess that this “Urgent” Question may be repeated at regular intervals. Government critics who argue that the establishment of an independent national inquiry was a very reluctant response to acute and urgent public concern, may feel vindicated by the Government’s inadequate line that “On all those issues, we are going as fast as we can and responding to the questions that Louise Casey has rightly asked. We are pushing to get all that work done as quickly as possible.” But the proposed pace of the Inquiry seems woefully dilatory.
Mims Davies succeeded in personalising the inadequacy of the judicial response to crimes victimising women and girls by mentioning the “bold testimony” of Fiona Goddard, who was raped and trafficked as a child by a grooming gang in Bradford in 2008 and who waived her right to anonymity and who has more recently highlighted the inadequate police, social worker and judicial response to the gangs recently noted that some of the men convicted of abusing her have already been released from prison.
Thank you for reading and please check out our instagram @theworldofukpolitics,
Alex
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