PMQs: Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak in sweary clash

To be uncharacteristically fair, it was just Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer who kept effing every 30 seconds and, even then, he was only quoting the Tory candidate in the recent Tamworth by-election.

Not that it was something Andrew Cooper said during it. His f-f-faux pas had come in a Facebook post from 2020. The past was a different country. You could say things back then.

This week’s Prime Minister’s Questions began with the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, welcoming the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi to the gallery. You’ll recall that, asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma said: “I think it would be a good idea.” Well, here was his grandson at the very effing fulcrum of it.

Keir Starmer at PMQs (Image: PA)

Mr Starmer welcomed his new members for Mid-Bedfordshire and Tamworth to the joint, taking the opportunity to recall Mr Cooper turning the internet blue by telling those struggling with the cost of living to “eff off”. Or “F off”, as Mr Cooper put it on a hand-drawn graph. However you spell it, Sir Keir warned the Speaker beforehand that he was going to “sanitise” the expression.

Maybe such sanitisation is what impressed the voters about the Labour leader. If I might paraphrase Nellie Pledge out of Nearest and Dearest: “He may not have any policies but at least he’s clean.”

Rishi Sunak, a Prime Minister, got a laugh when he welcomed the new two, adding: “I suspect the new member for Mid-Beds may actually support me a little bit more than the last one.” That was a reference to Boris loyalist and former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who was a pain in Rishi’s bum.

The previous Tamworth incumbent (Tory and latterly Independent) had been the appropriately named Chris Pincher, who’d resigned after groping allegations. Amazing that Tamworth voters had had it with the Tories really. Give ’em enough grope, I guess.

Sir Keir lambasted the PM for not distancing himself from “those appalling comments” and suggested that, in “throwing expletives at struggling families”, Mr Cooper had just been “following Government lines”. A clear case of the effing and blinding leading the effing and blinding.

Read more: Keir Starmer calls for election so public can tell Tories to 'eff off'

When Mr Starmer detected Tory members laughing while he talked about mortgage pressures on families, he observed: “They may think this is funny. This is real life.” This sort of thing – laughing, not real life – comes up in the Commons from time to time, and it’s often unfair. They were probably laughing at Keir’s hair or his 1940s accent.

After Mr Sunak pointed out that mortgage rates had doubled in America and trebled in Europe – three wrongs clearly making a right – the Labour leader accused him of being “tone-deaf” to conversations about prices “in every caff, pub and supermarket in Britain”. Caff? See what we mean about the 1940s? 

Soon, he was at it again: “Across our country the British people are rolling up their sleeves and getting on with it.” Sleeves? Rolling? It? He’s living in a Pathé news fantasy world. I bet these plucky Britons were wearing woolly waistcoats and whistling as well. 

Thankfully, we returned to the rude and unpleasant modern world, with Keir banging on again about the Tamworth Cusser, averring that voters having “heard the Government telling them to eff off … want the chance to return the compliment”.

By now, the Tory benches were getting f-f-fed up with this, while the PM bunged forth his usual trope about the Government getting on with ruining, sorry running, the country.

Read more: Labour overturns two huge Conservative majorities in double by-election win

“Contrast that to his leadership,” said Rishi of Keir, “too cautious to say anything and hope that nobody notices.”

Meanwhile, somebody – the SNP – had noticed there was a war on. The party’s deputy Westminster leader “Murray” Black (as Mr Speaker calls her) asked the PM: “How much worse does the situation have to get before he will join us in calls for a humanitarian ceasefire?” Why do they keep calling it a “humanitarian ceasefire”? Is there such thing as an inhumane ceasefire?

Rishi asked Mhairi to remember that Israel had suffered “a shockingly brutal attack”, and said he’d always backed aid getting in, “which of course necessitates specific pauses as distinct from a ceasefire”.

Specific pauses? Er, might that not encompass a ceasefire, humanitarian or otherwise? My apologies. Last thing anyone needs is a war of semantics.

And so there we take a specific pause until the next instalment of PM Effing Qs.