PMQs live: Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer clash over strikes and school spending | Politics

Angela Rayner is seeking to put the government on the ropes over its failure to appoint a successor to Lord Geidt as Rishi Sunak’s ethics adviser.

The Guardian revealed earlier this week that several candidates had turned down the role because Sunak is refusing to grant the new adviser the power to launch their own investigations. Sunak had promised that appointing a new ethics adviser would be one of his top priorities in office.

During an urgent question, Labour’s deputy leader accused ministers of promising “jam tomorrow” and “manana, manana”.

But she failed to pin down Alex Burghart, the junior minister at the Cabinet Office, on any of the specifics of the appointment. He told her:

We’re going to have an independent adviser, they’re going to have the powers that they need, and they are going to be appointed very soon.

But he refused to answer any of the detailed questions he was asked about how many candidates had been approached and when the process might be complete.

Here is my colleague Peter Walker’s story about PMQs.

And this is how the story starts.

Keir Starmer has used prime minister’s questions to make a pointed and personal attack on Rishi Sunak over tax benefits for private schools, saying the policy of continued VAT exemption for school fees amounted to “trickle-down education”.

Specifically using Winchester, the private school Sunak attended, as an example, Starmer highlighted a 2017 article by Michael Gove that argued for VAT to be imposed on school fees.

“Winchester College has a rowing club, a rifle club and extensive art collection – they charge over £45,000 a year in fees,” the Labour leader said. “Why did he hand them nearly £6m of taxpayers’ money this year in what his levelling up secretary calls ‘egregious state support’?”

Citing the contrasting example of Southampton, where Sunak grew up, Starmer said four in every ten state school pupils in the city failed either their English or maths GCSEs.

Keir Starmer won that quite comfortably, but it was a notable victory – one to remember, and possibly a turning point – for two reasons. The main one is that Starmer is now establishing a winning track record in this arena, and he is bedding down two criticisms of Rishi Sunak that are starting to stick: privileged, and “weak”. Another month of this and it will be received wisdom. But, second, this may have been the most successful example of a Labour leader using private education against a Tory PM in recent times.

David Cameron and Boris Johnson were both educated at the most elite private school in the country, and Conservative MPs generally are less likely to be state-educated than Labour MPs, but in the past Labour leaders have been cautious about using this as a line of attack. In part that was because people are not responsible for where their parents send them to school, in part it was because it smacked of class warfare, and in part it was out of fear of being on the wrong side of the aspiration argument. Only a minority of people are rich enough to afford private education, but there are many more who would like to be that wealthy one day, and Tony Blair taught his party that it was best not to alarm this group.

Yet Starmer today (with a little help from Michael Gove, whom he quoted) successfully monstered Sunak over going to Winchester. It is worth looking in detail at why it worked for Starmer so well.

First, Sunak’s response was poor. There is not a particularly good argument in favour of the tax advantages enjoyed by private eduction (as Gove pointed out in his Times article five years ago), but there are arguments (principally the cost to the state if private schools close), which is partly why Labour largely accepted the status quo when it was in office. Sunak could have opted a techno-bore answer, laced with references to Labour figures being privately educated. (Starmer himself went to a school that turned private while he was there, although he was able to finish his education there without his parents paying fees.) But instead, in his first response to Starmer, Sunak went for a total non-sequitur, banging on about Covid and the unions. And, in his second response, Sunak went way over the top, claiming Stamer’s question showed that he was “attacking the hard-working aspiration of millions of people in this country”, which meant that “he’s not fit to lead”.

Second, the Labour policy is popular, and has become more so in recent years. As living standards stagnate, there may be more public appetite for bashing private education in the past. My colleague Pippa Crerar has the polling figures.

Third, by presenting private education as an “aspiration” issue, Sunak made it easier for Starmer to attack him over home ownership. Telling Sunak he should “get out more”, he said:

He talks about aspiration, they are killing off aspiration in this country and it is not just education. Why is the dream of homeownership far more remote now than it was when his party came into power 12 years ago?

Sunak is the richest person ever to be prime minster. In the past Britons have tended not to mind very much about their political leaders being wealthy. (We are still ruled by a King, after all; egalitarian, we’re not.) But they do expect their prime ministers to be in touch, and to know what people are experiencing. In this exchange Starmer turned Sunak being privileged into a riff about him being clueless, and it worked.

Starmer ended with a spiel about Sunak being weak. (“Every week he gets pushed around and every week he gets weaker”). Sunak has his own weak jibe in response. (“Too weak to confirm no one on the picket line.”) This sounds like an argument about character. In reality, a leader’s “strength” or “weakness” is probably 80% a consequence of political context (how much space they have available to act), and at most only 20% a matter of personal authority and leadership virility. But the public at large won’t take much convincing that Sunak is weak, given everything that is happening in his party and in the country at large (see 9.21am), and so this is an easy hit for Labour.