Adel Darwish- The Caretaker in No.10: Starmer as the Temp in His Own Government- PMQues Special Review 17th December 2025
Adel Darwish reviews Starmer for his Penultimate PMQs of the year
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PMQs last week left an odd impression: a Prime Minister with a majority, a fresh mandate and a humiliated opposition, somehow looking like the man brought in to mind the shop while everyone else measures up for the refit, Adel Darwish observed from the Press Gallery
There are PMQs where nothing lands. And then there are the sessions when the whole performance – the questions, the silences, the cheap shots and the expensive ones – crystallises into a single, unmistakable narrative. This week, the narrative was simple: Keir Starmer increasingly looks like the man installed to “mind the shop” while the real owners decide what to do with the place.
Kemi Badenoch had luck on her side before she’d spoken a word; the question ballot delivered three Conservatives in the main rota, giving her ample space to turn PMQs into a rolling indictment of Labour’s short record and Starmer’s loosening grip.
Badenoch wasted no time setting the tone. Before Starmer had warmed the varnish on the despatch box, she asked why so many of his own MPs were now calling him a “caretaker Prime Minister”. She said it with that particular Badenoch mixture: half-smile, half-dismissal, and just enough politeness to conceal the blade.
Starmer responded with the standard issue: pride in the Budget, energy bill reductions, protecting the NHS, delivering stability. None of it quite answered the charge, and all of it felt slightly rehearsed – less like a Prime Minister in command than a barrister reading from the wrong bundle.
But Badenoch had come armed – and, crucially, briefed, and the Commons could sense it. Each time Starmer dodged into a fog of generalities, she punctured it with a single word – “Wrong” – followed by a number from his own departments. Bills up, taxes up, police numbers down, teachers down, NHS appointments lost to strikes. Facts, cleanly delivered, while Starmer scrambled to retrieve mood music and talking points.
Then came the moment that made even the jaded backbenches sit up. Starmer had attempted a boast about education; Badenoch cut in, paused theatrically, and asked:
“Where is she? Where is she?”
She let the chamber stew for a beat before answering her own question: “Ah – there she is.” It was more than a jibe. It was a reference Westminster insiders, especially hacks in the Press Gallery, caught instantly. Just a week earlier, the Education Secretary had pulled out of her scheduled appearance at the Press Gallery lunch – at the last minute – leaving journalists muttering that she had lost her nerve even in a friendly forum.
So when Badenoch asked, “Where is she?”, it wasn’t just geography. It was a comment on a Cabinet that has gone quiet, skittish, and visibly unsure of its footing.
Starmer, meanwhile, looked like the only man in the chamber who didn’t understand the joke.
But the real strike came later. After skewering the Home Secretary for allegedly taking counsel from Tony Blair and implying half the Cabinet were auditioning to replace Starmer, Badenoch delivered the killer line: the only person not bidding for his job, she said, was the Chancellor – “because she’s far too busy trying to cling on to her own.”
It stung because it chimed with a wider truth. Starmer has begun to look oddly peripheral inside his own government. A leader at the centre of events would not be surrounded by Cabinet ministers described – in whispers or otherwise – as plotting, briefing or hiding under the tablecloth.
And this week, it wasn’t only Badenoch.
The Lib-Dem leader Ed Davey, who normally uses his PMQs slot to distribute light injuries to both major parties and then request electoral reform, turned his guns directly on the Prime Minister. He pressed Starmer on Donald Trump’s attacks on European leaders and on London’s Mayor, and asked why Starmer would not stand up publicly to Trump. The Prime Minister answered with a gauzy speech about unity, values and stability. What he did not do was say he would challenge Trump.
Davey noticed. The House noticed.
He then asked – with a politeness far more lethal than any Tory barb – whether Starmer was refusing to explore a customs union with Europe out of genuine principle or simply because he feared that, “in twelve months’ time, he wouldn’t be standing there.”
Once the Liberal Democrats start talking about your tenure in the conditional tense, you are deep into caretaker country.
If Westminster needed confirmation, the Lords provided it. Starmer has come under heavy fire for appointing 25 Labour peers in a single swoop – a move critics describe as naked cronyism, stuffing the Upper House with loyalists in order to ram through Bills that were not in the Labour manifesto and that have not been thought through with anything approaching constitutional seriousness.
Peers – by design – notice such things. And they have already made clear that these hurried proposals that weren’t mentioned in Labour’s election manifesto, from decriminalising abortion to a potential assisted dying bill, will not glide through without the kind of scrutiny the Government appears increasingly allergic to. In the Lords, political impatience is not a virtue; it is a red rag to the ancient, procedural bull.
The cumulative picture is unmistakable. Starmer spent PMQs batting away deliveries rather than setting the field. The lines felt thin. The Cabinet looked restless. The opposition landed blows. The Lib Dems poured petrol on the embers. In the Lords, muttering grows about rushed legislation and a Prime Minister too quick to stack the benches.
Polling, meanwhile, has turned frostbitten. Starmer and Reeves have slumped to their lowest numbers since taking office, while Reform continues its steady rise. There are only so many weeks you can explain away before the word “trajectory” becomes unavoidable.
Thus emerges the new silhouette of this government: powerful on paper, fragile in performance; a leader with the keys to No.10 but the aura of a caretaker – the man brought in to water the plants until the real governing begins.
Starmer still has time, authority and a majority. But once the village decides the vicar is temporary, the congregation looks elsewhere for certainty.
The questions asked at PMQs were about energy, taxes, immigration, schools, Trump and Europe. The real question, unspoken but hanging over the chamber, was simpler: How long does the caretaker have the keys?
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