Keir Starmer opened PMQs by describing ‘the plight of the Member for Mid Norfolk’, whose mortgage had gone up by £1,200 a month and had to ‘quit his dream job to pay for it’. That Substack post from Tory MP George Freeman isn’t quite as potent as a note left on a Treasury desk, but it allowed the Labour leader to attack Sunak by saying ‘a Tory MP counting the cost of Tory chaos after 14 years, and we finally discovered what they meant when they said ‘we’re all in this together”.’

Rishi Sunak’s response was to accuse Labour of not having a plan, and to quibble the figures about the rise in mortgage costs. He listed the action the government had taken to help homeowners, and said: ‘What we have recently seen is mortgage applications now at a multi-month high as a result of confidence returning.’ He added that Rachel Reeves had been ‘equally confused’, going from backing tax cuts while in Davos to calling them a ‘scorched earth policy’ back in Westminster. ‘She obviously can’t decide which Wikipedia page to copy this week.’

The Prime Minister had another good joke about Labour’s inconsistency which was ‘the right hon. Member for Doncaster North has carved a promise in stone’, a reference to another awkward Labour artefact known as the ‘Ed Stone’. Ed Miliband’s 2015 election pledges on a large gravestone would be less of a joke were he not in the shadow cabinet fighting with colleagues over the £28 billion green spending pledge. That £28 billion forms the basis of Sunak’s accusation that the one plan Labour does have will be bad for the country. Beyond that, his ‘back to square one with Labour’ line just doesn’t have the sting it did when Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, or indeed Gordon Brown were in charge.

The session had opened with a scolding from the Speaker about the way MPs were behaving

The pair plugged away at their themes: Starmer’s was the cost of the Tory government; Sunak’s was Labour not having a plan. ‘Trust and economy credibility come from sticking to a plan,’ Sunak claimed, to laughs from the opposition benches, adding that Labour’s pledges ‘just aren’t worth the Wikipedia page they were copied from.’ He wasn’t the only one to repeat lines: Starmer responded twice to the Prime Minister’s answers with a near identical list of the things he said the Conservatives had done to crash the economy. He moved on from Freeman to a man called Phil who he’d met in Warrington and who worked for Iceland. It was a reference to the defection of Iceland boss Richard Walker from the Tories to Labour. Some MPs jeered at this, which allowed Starmer to say: ‘Laughing at an employee at Iceland who’s struggling with his mortgage. Shame! He told me that his mortgage is going up by £1,000 a month, Prime Minister. He doesn’t want other averages, other people, other stories: that’s what’s happening to him. If the member for Mid-Norfolk on £120,000 couldn’t afford this Tory government, how on earth can people like Phil?’

Starmer also complained twice that ‘I didn’t expect him to be laughing at Phil’. Poor Phil was probably regretting ever meeting a politician at this point as much as George Freeman might be regretting moaning about his mortgage in a blog.

The session had opened with a scolding from the Speaker about the way MPs were behaving. He acknowledged that an election was approaching, but complained about the way ‘some of the language used in questions has also fallen short of the standard and good temper and moderation that should characterise the proceedings of this house’. He was presumably referring to the use of words like ‘batshit’ and ‘shitshow’, which were quotes attributed to members of the government describing their own policies. Hoyle later told members off for making too much noise while Sunak and Starmer were discussing poor Phil. It’s a shame he can’t also offer content warnings for the quality of answers.