Keir Starmer, under fire from all sides, responded with anger – but no answers

Keir Starmer knew he was in for a tough time at Prime Minister’s Questions, so he tried two defences. The first was humour.

He recited the usual formula about his engagements for the day. “This morning, I had meetings with ministerial colleagues,” he said, adding: “There have been quite a few of those this week…”

But he couldn’t keep it up, and it might have seemed in poor taste if he had – so he switched to being cross and biting back.

Kemi Badenoch asked him what happened to his claim that he always took responsibility himself and never turned on his staff – after he sacked Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff, at the weekend for advising him to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US.

Starmer defended McSweeney’s achievement in helping him to change the party and deliver the smallest number of Conservative MPs in over 100 years. In other words, not answering the question, and yah-boo.

That was the pattern for the rest of his answers. Badenoch pointed out that, last week, he had defended Chris Wormald, the cabinet secretary, but seemed to have abandoned him this week. Starmer replied that she had said she was confident that no more of her MPs would defect to Reform, only for Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, to go. (This produced a solitary gleeful cheer from a Tory MP at the back of the chamber.)

When Badenoch asked why Matthew Doyle had been given a peerage after Starmer knew that he had campaigned for a man charged with child sex offences, Starmer just said that Doyle “did not give a full account of his actions”, and that he had had the Labour whip removed. But that was it. He moved straight on to attack the Tories for the so-called “rape clause”, which required women who had a third child as a result of rape to disclose their trauma to claim benefits.

Stephen Flynn, the Scottish National Party leader, followed up, saying that Starmer’s defence of his decisions on Mandelson and Doyle was that “they weren’t clear with him”, which meant that “he appears to be the most gullible former director of public prosecutions in history”.

Starmer’s response was the same: avoid the question and counterattack. He said that Peter Murrell, the former SNP chief executive and former husband of Nicola Sturgeon, “goes on trial for embezzling money” in nine days.

He treated Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, to the same tactic. Davey accused him of failing to take responsibility for his own mistakes. “Austerity!” Starmer shot back, claiming Davey had caused many of today’s problems as a member of the coalition government more than a decade ago.

Starmer was also in trouble with his own side. Female Labour MPs in particular are not happy about the failure to take Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of women and girls seriously enough. Labour whips did their best to organise noisy support for the prime minister, but there was more noise coming from the relatively small numbers on the Tory side – and the looks on the faces of many Labour MPs told their own story. Even Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, who shouted and pointed at Badenoch boisterously enough, was stony-faced by the time we got to Flynn.

Starmer was helped by low expectations in that, after the week he has had, people almost expect him to unfurl a white flag at the despatch box and ask the doorkeepers to escort him from the premises. So simply by showing some fight and getting through the half hour without bursting into tears, Starmer did better than he might have done.

It is not unusual for politicians to avoid answering questions, but to do it so consistently and aggressively looked like weakness. He even claimed at one point that he had kicked his former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, “out of my party” while Badenoch had not done the same to Liz Truss. Which is true – but has nothing to do with the questions he was asked, which were about his decisions on Mandelson and Doyle.

Those questions were not answered today, but they will continue to be asked in the days and weeks ahead.