Pass the nibbles
Prime minister Rishi Sunak will try to rally the troops today by taking his cabinet to Chequers for an away day. Sunak heads to the Buckinghamshire countryside with the Nadhim Zahawi tax saga still very much hanging over him, not to mention continuing industrial strife, an NHS creaking at the seams and Putin's illegal war still raging in Ukraine.
It is understood that Zahawi, the Conservative Party chairman and cabinet minister without portfolio, will attend today's session, which is reportedly being used to strategise for the next general election. Political hacks might want to ask Sunak why he feels it is appropriate for Zahawi to attend, given that he appeared to avoid the Commons yesterday for PMQs as the calls for him to resign grew. Reports this morning say that some of Zahawi's colleagues are furious that he is there.
Based on Sunak's performance at PMQs yesterday, top of the agenda at Chequers today might be working out some new attack lines for the PM to use against Keir Starmer, who seems to be growing in confidence with every outing at the dispatch box. Sunak has tried counter Starmer's accusation that he is weak by saying that it is the Labour labour who is, in fact, the weak one because "he's in the pockets of the unions" and supported Jeremy Corbyn.
But as my esteemed colleague John Rentoul and other top columnists have pointed out, this line of attack is not really working because it isn't true: the RMT union, organising rail strikes and the Royal College of Nursing, organising walkouts by nurses, are no longer affiliated with the Labour Party. And in terms of Corbyn, the independent MP for Islington North has had the whip removed and has been told that he probably won't ever get it back, following a root and branch investigation of anti-Semitism in the party.
Added to this is that the type of voters Starmer needs to win over don't care much about the internal politics of opposition parties. Labour strategists once remarked that nailing down Boris Johnson was like trying to pin custard to a wall. Is Starmer now the custard? While Sunak and his strategists will doubtless try to hone their attacks in the weeks ahead, both he and Starmer know that the election will be won or lost on the state of the economy, rather than performative exchanges in the House of Commons, which are largely used to galavanise support among backbenchers. This could well prove more difficult for Sunak.
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