Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer clash over housing market and rising mortgage costs at PMQs – UK politics live | Politics

Rishi Sunak has given an interview to Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 ahead of tomorrow’s local elections.

He started by summarising the anti-fraud strategy announced today.

Downing Street has said it is “disappointing” that Sue Gray did not cooperate with the Cabinet Office inquiry into her departure from the civil service to take up a job with Keir Starmer.

Asked about the statement issued yesterday on this topic, Rishi Sunak’s press secretary told journalists at the post-PMQs briefing:

The prime minister is not obviously involved in this process. But it is obviously disappointing that Sue Gray was offered to co-operate and has chosen not to do so.

I think what is more disappointing is that Keir Starmer is in a position where he could clear up very quickly when contact was made by his office or by him to Sue Gray to uphold the integrity of the Civil Service and ensure that it is transparent and open.

The next election will be a contest between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. But what we learned from today’s exchanges was that Starmer would rather be fighting Liz Truss, and Sunak wants to campaign against Gordon Brown. This says something about the respective strength of both leaders, and their parties.

In an ideal world you would not need to attack the leader of the other party’s predecessor, because the current leader would provide a good target anyway, but Liz Truss’s brief premiership was such a disaster for the Conservative party that it would be foolish – even negligent – for Starmer to stop talking about it. Today he referenced her very directly with his first two questions, challenging Sunak to explain how many people were paying higher mortgages as a result of her mini-budget. Sunak did not answer directly, for reasons that were obvious when Starmer answered his own first question.

The question was how many people are paying more on their mortgages each month. The answer that the prime minister avoided giving is 850,000. Nearly a million people paying more on their mortgage each month because his party used their money as a casino chip.

Then, answering his second question, he said:

By the end of this year nearly 2 million homeowners counting the cost of the Tories’ economic vandalism with every mortgage payment they make.

Labour has been campaigning hard on housing over the last week and, as Starmer showed effectively, it is easy to rubbish the Tories’ record. Although focusing on Truss, Starmer also pinned it on Sunak, referencing his admission in a ConservativeHome interview recently that he abandoned plans for compulsory housebuilding targets because Conservative members and activists found them unacceptable. Sunak said he was in favour of localism, but south-east nimbies vote Tory anyway, and it was a weak retort.

By the time he was responding to question four, Sunak had to fall back on the “no money left” note left by the chief secretary to the Treasury at the end of the Gordon Brown government, which is currently being tweeted out, almost hourly, by Greg Hands, the Conservative chair. It is probably true that the “no money left” note revives the lingering concerns about Labour’s economic competence felt by some voters (mostly Tories). But if the Conservatives believe they can parry a Truss by playing a Brown they are in dire trouble.

First, Truss was in power just seven months ago; Brown hasn’t been in office for 13 years. Second, Sunak was in government with Truss, and they are both associated with an administration that has been in office, in one form or another, for 13 years; Starmer did not have anything do do with the Brown government. And, third, people are still experiencing the impact of the Truss administration; Brown is now part of political history.

(Also, Brown was not responsible for the financial crash of 2008-09 anyway, but we can save that argument for another day.)

In a reference to yesterday’s tuition fees story, Sunak referred at times to Starmer breaking promises. This will strike a chord with people who do think the Labour leader is shifty. But it sounded more like humouring the base than a compelling attack line, and probably less damaging to Starmer than going into an election with a £9bn spending promise he found hard to defend.

There was one other ex-leader referenced today. When Sunak became PM, one of his major advantages was that he was not Boris Johnson. But perhaps the Johnson gene is catching. At the last two PMQs Sunak was happy to indulge in personal attacks of the kind that his predecessor would have been happy with. And today he was pulled up for adopting a Johnson approach to truthfulness. In his first answer he said he had corrected the record after making a misleading statement last week. (See 12.04pm). More corrections may be needed. As PMQs ended, three separate opposition MPs raised points of order, saying Sunak had misled MPs about Sadiq Khan’s housebuilding record, the Scottish government’s performance on getting disadvantaged pupils into university and crime figures.

I can’t recall three separate points of order like this after a Johnson PMQs. “Less accurate than Boris Johnson” – that’s not a verdict any PM should welcome.