Coming after he made a £1,000 bet with Piers Morgan about deporting migrants to Rwanda, Rishi Sunak was under pressure at this week’s PMQs to show that he gets the public mood.
Instead on Wednesday, as Brianna Ghey’s mother listened in the Commons chamber, he attracted opposition cries of “shame on you” for attempting a joke about transgender people.
In between last week’s session of Prime Minister’s Questions and this one, two school friends described by a judge as "sadistic" were sentenced to lengthy jail terms for the "exceptionally brutal" murder of 16-year-old Brianna in a Warrington park almost exactly a year ago.
Hardly the best time, therefore, for the PM to try to ridicule Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s position on what constitutes a woman - but absolutely not so when Esther Ghey was looking down from the public gallery.
The Labour leader had praised the “unwavering bravery” of Mrs Ghey before moving on to attack the Prime Minister over NHS waiting lists, after Mr Sunak admitted to Mr Morgan that record-long queues amounted to a policy failure.
The PM hit back by listing policy flip-flops by Sir Keir: "I think I have counted almost 30 in the last year.
“Pensions, planning, peerages, public sector pay, tuition fees, childcare, second referendums, defining a woman - although in fairness that was only 99 per cent of a U-turn.”
The Tory benches guffawed, none more uproariously than Health Secretary Victoria Atkins who was sat to Mr Sunak’s left. Their jeering at Labour ebbed when Sir Keir recalled Mrs Ghey’s presence and declared: “Shame.”
The PM ignored a subsequent invitation from Labour MP Liz Twist to apologise to Mrs Ghey for his “insensitive comment”, before using his very last answer of the session to belatedly praise Brianna’s mother as representing “the very best of humanity in the face of seeing the very worst of humanity”.
Mr Sunak also declined an invitation from SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn to apologise for the Rwanda bet, made during an interview on TalkTV with Mr Morgan.
He restated his determination to get to grips with the small boats crisis. But to many, the bet appeared distasteful at best amid a cost-of-living crisis, and callous at worst given lives are at stake.
After PMQs, the uber-rich Conservative leader is again fending off opposition charges that he is too “out of touch” to appreciate the public’s concerns heading into an election later this year.
