Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch challenged Andy Burnham over Labour’s unpublished 10-year plan, the budget and oil-field approvals during prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, according to a political sketch by The Guardian’s John Crace.

Burnham said the plan would be presented to the House of Commons before Christmas. That response supplied a publication timetable after Badenoch questioned where the document was, Crace reported. His account did not provide details of the plan’s contents.

The exchange followed a remark Badenoch made on Tuesday that the proposal would be a nine-year plan by the time it appeared. At Wednesday’s session, she also labelled the government’s fiscal package a “do nothing” budget. The supplied account did not set out specific budget measures she challenged during that exchange.

Energy policy was another point of contention. Badenoch raised the Rosebank oil field, and Burnham responded that the Conservatives had drawn up its licence. He also pointed to Labour having given the go-ahead to Jackdaw, according to Crace’s account. No firm timetable for Rosebank emerged from the exchange described in the sketch.

Badenoch also made a joke involving Russell Brand and Ed Miliband. Crace contrasted that with her position at a press conference the previous day, when she had declined an invitation to attack Labour over past associations with Brand. According to the sketch, she had argued that doing so would be disrespectful to victims and unfair to politicians whose associations predated public knowledge of wrongdoing.

The Conservative leader closed by listing complaints against Labour and asking whether its MPs thought replacing Keir Starmer with Burnham had been worthwhile.

Crace’s assessment was sharply critical of Badenoch’s approach, portraying her performance as focused on jokes rather than sustained policy questioning. That characterization is the columnist’s judgment, rather than a finding from a parliamentary transcript or a separate straight-news account supplied for this story.

Sources