Rayner grills Raab over Lebedev and Saudi oil

When Angela Rayner faces Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions, it is obvious that both sides rather enjoy the exchanges. When she’s up against Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, as she was today, it feels like more of a grudge match. The session naturally centred around Ukraine, but as is Rayner’s habit, it was more political than previous PMQs.

Labour’s deputy made her theme the government’s failure to ensure Britain’s oil security and links to Russian oligarchs. Much of her attack was about flaws in the absent Prime Minister’s own character: the first question was whether Johnson’s comments about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe when he was Foreign Secretary had made the situation worse. Then she spent three questions on the allegations that Johnson had overruled security advice to not offer a peerage to Evgeny Lebedev.

Raab’s strategy for these questions was largely to scold Rayner, telling her that she ‘should know better’ than to complain about a peerage for someone who had made a contribution to society, and that she was talking ‘sheer nonsense’ when she asked if Johnson had requested that the security services revise their assessment of Lebedev (though he didn’t engage directly with that question). He was very keen to remind the House that Rayner might want to talk about national security but had wanted anti-Nato, anti-Trident Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister – until the Speaker told him to stop harking back to the past decisions of the opposition and to answer questions about the government. The final two exchanges between the pair were about energy security, with two memorable lines from Rayner about the government having 12 years to sort out the UK’s dependence on foreign oil, and a reminder that last week Starmer had told the Commons last week that Britain should never again be at the mercy of a foreign dictator for its energy and fuel security, only for Johnson to go ‘cap in hand from one dictator to another on a begging mission to the Saudi prince to bail him out’. This last attack on the Saudi trip underlined one of the possible knock-on effects of some of the sanctions announced in recent days: Labour and other parties might well argue that if you’ve sanctioned Roman Abramovich and Chelsea, why not Newcastle given its owners are accused of human rights abuses?

Ian Blackford, rumoured to be on his way out as SNP Westminster leader, has interestingly become rather less shouty and more reasonable at PMQs of late. His questions were about refugees and an appalling delay to the transfer of 50 Ukrainian orphans from the country to Scotland. ‘Even where there is the will, it seems there is no way when the Home Office gets involved,’ he said.

It is always hard for the stand-in to answer questions on behalf of their boss, and Raab had clearly decided to avoid doing so as much as possible. When he did engage with a backbench attack from Labour’s Matt Western about ‘what first attracted the Prime Minister to the billionaire Russian oligarchs’, he ended up falling into his habit of unintentionally saying something easily quotable, which was that ‘the Prime Minister is not just a very social individual’ but that he also wanted the country to be open and outward-looking. Given much of the session was about Johnson’s judgement in socialising with certain figures, some Conservatives might be wishing their leader was a bit more of an introvert.