PMQs: Starmer’s astonishing Nigel Farage imitation

The small boats have landed. PMQs was dominated by the migration issue and the flotillas of dinghies struggling across the channel each day. So far this year over 40,000 doughty oarsmen have braved the seas in inflatable rafts. And they’re not just desperate to flee France with its rude waiters, pretentious language and over-complicated cheese menus. There’s another motive. We were about to hear it in plain language from the despatch box. 

Sir Keir started it. At first he merely sought to destabilise Suella Braverman and reinforce the clamour for her removal. 

‘The Home secretary says our asylum system is broken. Who broke it?’ he asked. 

Rishi Sunak, usually lightening-quick, paused for a second.

‘Let’s look at the record on immigration,’ he said. Swiftly changing the subject he reminded us that the Tories had given Britain the In/Out referendum. True enough. But that pledge was made by David Cameron in 2013 and it seemed a little odd to re-announce it nine years later. Still, it helped Rishi wriggle out of a tight spot. He added that Tory controls on migration have been opposed by Labour. Sir Keir defended himself rather curiously. 

‘No one wants open borders on this side of the house,’ he said. Which will come as news to most people. Open borders are central to the EU project that he worships and longs to re-join. But Sir Keir had the upper hand and he lambasted Rishi and his hapless Home Secretary for overseeing a system in a state of collapse. Hotels have run out of rooms. Refugee centres are ‘massively over-crowded with diseases of all sorts are breaking out,’ said Sir Keir. 

But it’s hard to see what solution will work. Tethering a decommissioned warship to the cargo terminal at Dover would help. Vacant oil-rigs might be pressed into service. Refugees could be offered empty cabins aboard the cruise-liners that ply the Norwegian coast and the Baltic sea – which is no different from crowding them into cheap hotels. And it can’t be long before someone suggests a daily boat-race from Dover to Calais with a prize of €5,000 and a Maltese passport for the winning crew. Any of these schemes would be cheaper than the botched Rwanda plan which, as Sir Keir said, ‘has cost £140 million,’ and has failed. Not a single refugee has so far been whisked from Kent to Africa’s jungle paradise. 

‘Thousands are crossing the channel in small boats each week,’ he yelled. ‘And hardly any claims are being processed.’ The result? ‘Criminal gangs running amok!’ This was astonishing. The Labour leader had explicitly linked incoming migrants with criminality. 

He ended by going full Nigel Farage as he told Rishi to ‘get a proper Home Secretary and crack down on the smuggling game.’ 

Labour’s Sarah Jones took up the ‘broken asylum’ theme. Her denunciation was thunderous. 

‘The backlog is now so great, the decision-making so collapsed, and the number of returns so low … that the criminal gangs have a business model to die for.’ That too could have come straight from a Nigel Farage podcast but the words were delivered by a Labour left-winger. Rishi accused the opposition of hypocrisy and expressed another sentiment often used by Farage. 

‘They’re not serious about this problem because they don’t think it matters.’ 

An amazing spectacle. Both mainstream parties were vying to outflank each other from the right. Parliament is finally catching up with the pubic. And leading politicians are trying to convince us that they supported UKIP all along. What a day. PMQs was won by a man who has never been an MP.