Kemi Badenoch was in her political and ideological comfort zone at prime minister’s questions this afternoon.
Since her elevation as leader in November 2024, ConservativeHome has tracked in real-time how far — and how quickly — Badenoch’s fortunes have fallen among the Tory grassroots. In the Conservative bible’s latest league table, she ranks as a middling shadow minister — featuring just below Nigel Huddleston, the party chair, and 0.1 points above Jesse Norman, the shadow commons leader.
The activists, in short, have lost sight of the qualities they once associated with Badenoch, a former grassroots darling. Her eminence in these league tables was once an inarguable fact of Tory life. Today’s session of prime minister’s questions, therefore, was a chance for Badenoch to restore the Conservative Party’s dwindling faith in its leader by returning to her specialist subject: gender politics.
Badenoch, one of Westminster’s most vocal campaigners for single-sex spaces, was greeted with a raucous cheer from her backbenchers as she gripped the despatch box. The wall of noise was effusive — but expectant. The Conservative leader responded by dedicating her six allotted questions to the supreme court’s landmark ruling last week.
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The debate presents a politically appealing dichotomy: Badenoch can re-emphasise her standing as a combative, conviction politician — while problematising Keir Starmer’s belated acquiescence to the supreme court’s position, after years of slippery U-turns.
The result was the spikiest confrontation yet between the prime minister and his opposition counterpart.
Badenoch began, as has become standard practice, with a short question: “Does the prime minister now accept that when he said it was the law that trans women were women, he was wrong?”
Starmer responded that the government will support and implement the supreme court ruling and “continue to protect single-sex spaces based on biological sex”.
“Let me be clear”, he began. “I welcome the Supreme Court ruling on this issue. It brings clarity and it will give confidence to women and of course to service providers.”
But he added, in a challenge to Badenoch: “We will also ensure that trans people are treated with respect and we will ensure that everybody is given dignity in their everyday lives.
“I do think this is the time now to lower the temperature, to move forward and to conduct this debate with the care and compassion that it deserves. And I think that should unite the whole house.”
Hitting back, the Conservative leader called on Starmer to apologise to Rosie Duffield, the now independent MP who left Labour last year after recurrent battles with the party leadership. Badenoch said the PM had “hounded” his onetime colleague out of the party for “simply for telling the truth.”
Duffield, who was present in the chamber this afternoon, looked distinctly unimpressed as Starmer returned to the despatch box. He repeated his call for “dignity and respect” and warned against turning the supreme court ruling into a “political football”.
He referenced an exchange between himself and Rishi Sunak last year, in which the then-PM quipped that Starmer had made “99 per cent” of a U-turn over the issue of gender self-identification. The infamous line invoked the Labour leader’s comment that 99.9 per cent of women “of course haven’t got a penis”, which he delivered in an oft-quoted interview with LBC in 2023.
Starmer remarked today: “When we make this a political football… we end up with the spectacle of a decent man — and he was a decent man, the previous prime minister — diminishing himself at this despatch box making trans jokes whilst the mother of a murdered trans teenager [Brianna Ghey] watched from the public gallery…
“And I believe there is a consensus in this House and the country [in favour of] that approach.”
Badenoch responded by restating her support for Duffield — who has been linked with defecting to the Conservatives since leaving Labour. “There was no apology for the member for Canterbury, there was no taking of responsibility. He talks of political football, he practically kicked her out of his party”, she said.
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The Conservative leader went on to accuse Starmer of hiding after the supreme court ruling. “Why did it take him so long to respond? Isn’t it because he was scared?”
Starmer sensed a moment to seize the advantage and referred back to Badenoch’s appearance in the commons yesterday. Then, responding to equalities minister Bridget Phillipson, the Conservative leader rubbished the government’s position as “fiction”.
“The only fiction here is the idea that she delivered anything in office”, Starmer declared.
He pursued an effective line of attack that led MPs on a guided tour of Badenoch’s ministerial career. “She did precisely nothing” while women and equalities minister for two years, Starmer began. “She provided no clarity on the law, nothing to improve women’s lives which got materially worse under her watch…
“There’s a pattern of behaviour here. Women and equalities minister — failed to do anything for women. The trade minister who failed to get a trade deal with the US. The business minister who failed to get a deal for British steel.
“She’s a spectator, not a leader.”
It is striking the extent to which the news agenda overlaps with Badenoch’s ministerial experience. The resultant picture does not reflect all that glowingly on the now-Conservative leader.
This point, addressed by Starmer this afternoon, means the Conservative leader is always at risk of overplaying her hand at PMQs. The prime minister has fourteen years of Conservative government — of which Badenoch was a starring member — to refer to. Her ministerial lapses are uniquely salient.
The session’s second phase highlighted a further area in which Badenoch is exposed: the irrepressible activism of her shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick.
Returning to the despatch box, Badenoch cited leaked criticisms of last week’s supreme court ruling in a Labour WhatsApp group chat. Starmer responded that there is only one WhatsApp group Badenoch should worry about — “the one of her shadow justice secretary.”
Jenrick, whose immovable prominence is emerging as a major political problem for Badenoch, mistakenly added hundreds of Westminster insiders to a WhatsApp group last week.
Starmer pivoted to Jenrick’s comments, reported this morning, that indicate the shadow justice secretary’s support for a Reform-Conservative “coalition”.
“The mask has just slipped, just one week before the local elections”, the prime minister declared.
“The shadow justice secretary, who is not here — a man who is doing everything he can to replace her, a man who most of them [Tory MPs] want as a leader of their party, has admitted that Reform and the Tories are working together.”
He quipped that there is a “coalition between Reform and the Tories being formed behind [Badenoch’s] back”, adding that “in six short months she’s lost control of her party.”
Badenoch returned: “Who is playing political football now?”
The answer, with local elections on 1 May, was of course both party leaders. Although Badenoch’s follow-up was especially telling: “He should be more worried about his backbenchers than my frontbenchers.”
The prepared line suggests LOTO is well aware of the political pressure Jenrick is applying, albeit indirectly.
Finally, in a pointed peroration, the Conservative leader attacked Starmer using familiar tropes. She accused the prime minister of “bending the knee” to every “passing fad” and rubbished his lack of “moral courage”.
Starmer, she added, “doesn’t have the balls.”
With the Conservative benches rocking, Badenoch continued: “The prime minister only tells people what they want to hear. He is a weather vane who twists in the wind — he cheered an ideology that denied safe spaces to women and girls because he thought it was cool to do so. He hounded a brave female MP out of his party for telling the truth he accepts now.”
She concluded: “And now he is hiding behind the supreme court judgement. Isn’t that because he doesn’t know what he actually believes?”
Starmer’s response was equally spiky: “I can only assume that sounded better when she did it in the mirror earlier on.”
“The truth is it doesn’t really matter what the leader of the opposition says, because nobody believes — none of them — that she’s going to lead [the Conservative Party] into the next election anyway.
“It’s going to be the shadow justice secretary — he’s away plotting, that’s why he is not hear today — and the member for Clacton [Nigel Farage], fighting over the bones of the Tory party.”
He added: “The member for Clacton is going to do what he always does: eat the Tory party for breakfast.”
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It is always a reliable tactic to treat your PMQs sparring partner as a political irrelevance — especially when the accusation is credible. This is the approach Starmer deployed weekly versus Rishi Sunak, as an array of antagonistic Conservative groupings, caucuses and factions assembled behind him, knives sharpened.
Nevertheless, it’s notable just how explicit the prime minister was willing to be this afternoon. The comments are a signal that Starmer is, after all, preparing for a future in which Badenoch is deposed — and the Reform-Tory hybrid that could replace her.
Ultimately, after six pointed questions and six increasingly indignant answers, Starmer emerged looking less scathed than the Conservative Party would have liked heading into PMQs. Badenoch’s focus on her favourite subject was predictable — and Starmer arrived armed with some worthy comebacks. The emerging row over Jenrick’s “coalition” comments handed the PM additional ammunition.
Starmer’s targets were twofold: the Conservative frontbench and Reform’s parliamentary bridgehead. Nigel Farage, in his place this afternoon, looked pleased with his repeat mentions. But today, Starmer sought to toxify Reform UK and their Conservatives rivals by mutual association.
Overall, one wonders whether Badenoch used her best material at the despatch box yesterday. Facing Phillipson, the Conservative leader listed off a series of historic Labour positions that Starmer would now be unwilling to defend. Badenoch’s criticisms were combative, but notably less specific, this afternoon. Her extended focus on Rosie Duffield will carry little weight beyond Westminster.
But the Conservative benches looked roused enough today — a relatively rare sight. Badenoch’s zippier performance will be chalked up as a success in CCHQ.
And yet Badenoch will have few better opportunities to scorch Starmer than this: with the news agenda (in theory) on her side and speaking to her assumed strengths. Could Labour, then, interpret Starmer’s passable performance as proof that Badenoch is all but neutralised as a political threat?
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Badenoch rejects Labour’s response to supreme court ruling as ‘shameless work of fiction’
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‘I think the outpouring of grief and love that we’ve seen in the last two days or so shows the respect and admiration that he was held in around the world. May his Holiness rest in peace’
— Keir Starmer begins PMQs today by paying tribute to the late Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday at the age of 88.
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