How gloomy the massed ranks of Labour MPs look as they listen to their leader (see their faces in the picture above). Sir Keir Starmer has not the faintest idea how to cheer them up by giving them a glimpse of the sunlit uplands towards which they would like to think he is leading them.

The PM is stuck in a trap of his own making. Today he told his MPs yet again about the £21 billion black hole left by the Conservative Government, and the many other ways in which it wrecked the country.

He does this so thoroughly that his listeners begin to wonder whether there is any hope of turning things round. Starmer well knows how to express his shock and resentment at the blighted inheritance the Labour Government has received.

But he has now being doing this for six months, and the cumulative effect is to make him sound dreadfully despondent about the country’s prospects, and also dreadfully evasive, for nothing is ever his fault.

The buck does not stop with Starmer. It stopped, he suggested today, with Liz Truss.

Brian Leishman, Labour MP since 4 July 2024 for the newly created seat of Alloa and Grangemouth, reminded the PM of an election promise: “In the general election campaign the Labour leadership promised that if we won we would step in and save the Grangemouth Refinery, retain those jobs and invest in its future.”

Six months later, he continued, this has not happened. Will the Government now intervene to save jobs at Grangemouth?

The PM said this was a “really important point” and “before July there was no plan at all to support the workers at Grangemouth”, while the Government are “jointly funding Project Willow to find a viable long-term future”.

Leishman looked dissatisfied with this reply, as well he might, but at least he has a career to which he can return: he is a professional golfer, who has coached at many Scottish courses.

“How do you think Kemi Badenoch did?” several colleagues in the Commons Press Gallery asked after PMQs.

The answer is that she did fine, put various pointed questions to Starmer, but could perhaps have made life more difficult for him by asking him the same question more than once, and pointing out his failure to answer it.

Badenoch, however, is not the problem for Starmer. Against her he can make bitter retorts from his black hole about how terrible the Conservatives were.

The PM’s problem is with his own followers, and with the wider country, who have no desire to be stuck with Starmer in a black hole, and would like to know what he is for.

The post Andrew Gimson’s PMQs sketch: Starmer is stuck in a black hole, which is not where Labour MPs want to be appeared first on Conservative Home.