Post by Dr Krish Kandiah OBE

I must admit to mixed emotions watching Keir Starmer's final Prime Minister's Questions yesterday. The Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, struck a very different tone from previous exchanges, and I appreciated that a great deal. I was moved to hear the Prime Minister thank her for the kindness she had shown him privately during some very difficult moments: the death of his brother from cancer, and the arson attack on his family home. What I find hard is that this needed to happen in private. What gets called robust dialogue too often feels like combative, zero-sum politics. Surely a more compassionate and gracious politics, where we actually try to solve problems rather than score points off one another, would serve us all better. Our politicians are clearly capable of it. This last exchange proved as much. Wouldn't it be great if that became the norm rather than the exception?

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