Since taking office, Keir Starmer has used his opening answer at Prime Minister’s Questions very differently from his predecessors. In this post, Ruxandra Serban and Tom Fleming explore how Starmer’s approach to opening PMQs compares to that of other post-1997 Prime Ministers. 

In the UK, ‘Prime Minister’s Questions’ (PMQs) in the House of Commons is one of the most high-profile moments of the political week. Recent months have seen much analysis of how Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition, has performed in this arena. However, there has been surprisingly little discussion of how Keir Starmer’s approach to PMQs has differed from his predecessors’. In this blogpost, we outline how Starmer has used his opening answers – to the so-called ‘engagements’ question – as an additional opportunity to communicate the government’s key political messages. 

Why does PMQs (usually) begin with an ‘engagements’ question? 

PMQs starts with an exchange that is not a genuine question. The MP who comes first in the weekly shuffle (the process through which MPs apply to ask a question at PMQs) asks ‘the engagements question’, which currently takes the form of ‘if the Prime Minister will list his engagements for today’. In response, the Prime Minister (PM) usually outlines his or her commitments for that day. The MP can then ask a supplementary question on a topic of their choosing, and receive a further answer from the PM. 

This parliamentary ritual has developed over time. In the 1960s, PMs could theoretically be asked questions about any aspect of government policy, but varied in how far they agreed to answer them. The PM’s private office would frequently transfer some questions to other ministers when the topic was seen as more appropriate for their remit. MPs would still receive an answer, but without the opportunity to directly question the PM. To avoid this, MPs started developing ‘transfer-proof’ questions which were specific enough for the Prime Minister to answer personally and so could not justifiably be transferred. These initially referred to meetings or visits abroad, or to the member’s constituency, and it was in the 1970s that MPs first started using a question about the PM’s engagements in the form of ‘if he will list his engagements for today’. This meant that the PM was guaranteed to answer – no other minister could be responsible for the PM’s engagements for that day – and that the MP could then ask a supplementary question on any topic. That question could be more topical than was otherwise possible, given the maximum notice period of 10 sitting days operating at the time, which, together with an increase in the overall number of questions, meant that questions had to be submitted early to have a chance of being included on the order paper. Questions about engagements became a regular feature in the late 1970s, and continued to be used even after Margaret Thatcher stated that she would stop transferring questions. 

In its early form, the ‘engagements’ question looked quite different from today. Questions to the PM were subject to the same rules as all oral questions, and were formally questions ‘with notice’. MPs could submit either an open or a substantive question, but they were required to also submit the text in advance, meaning the ‘engagements’ question was usually asked more than once in every questioning session. This practice changed in 1997 when – following a recommendation from the Procedure Committee – MPs were advised to ask their intended supplementary question directly. This is when PMQs became in effect a procedure for questions without notice. All questions that appear on the order paper are therefore in theory ‘engagements’ questions (unless the MP has chosen to submit the text of the question), but only the first MP actually puts that question (by saying ‘Question number one, Mister Speaker’) — the others just ask their desired supplementary question. 

How did past Prime Ministers approach ‘engagements’ questions? 

Prime Ministers’ standard response to the ‘engagements’ question is the famous formula ‘This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House I shall have further such meetings later today’. However, in recent years PMs have increasingly preceded that answer with an additional opening statement. To trace the evolution of these opening statements, we have analysed the first 30 PMQs sessions of each PM since Tony Blair (who replaced two 15-minute sessions each week with the single 30-minute session we have today). Given the length of Blair’s premiership, we also included his final 30 sessions of PMQs. We excluded Liz Truss for the opposite reason.  

Table 1 identifies how often each PM preceded their direct answer to the engagements question with any additional opening statement. It also notes the (mean and median) combined length of their entire answer to the engagements question, including any such opening statement. 

Table 1. Answers to ‘engagements’ question at PMQs
PM	Opening statement	Mean length (words)	Median length (words)
Blair (first 30)	0 / 30 (0.0%)	29.3	26.0
Blair (last 30)	24 / 30 (80.0%)	119.9	112.0
Brown	16 / 30 (53.3%)	66.3	78.5
Cameron	24 / 30 (80.0%)	130.6	118.5
May	19 / 30 (63.3%)	76.8	83.0
Johnson	17 / 30 (56.7%)	76.5	79.0
Sunak	23 / 30 (76.7%)	69.1	68.5
Starmer	24 / 24 (100.0%)	152.4	154

It shows that these opening statements were not initially a feature of the post-1997 PMQs setup. Blair went straight to directly answering the engagements question in all of his first 30 PMQs sessions. While he did initially answer the question a little more literally than his successors, genuinely detailing his engagements for the day, he did not precede this with any additional statement until late 1998. From that point, he began to make occasional opening remarks, albeit still mostly framed as an account of his engagements that day, addressing topics like Remembrance Day on 11 November 1998, a hostage situation in Chechnya on 9 December 1998, and the murder of four British tourists in March 1999. But by the end of Blair’s premiership, such opening statements had become much more common. They remained a standard feature of PMQs thereafter. 

The content of these statements has evolved substantially over time. Blair’s final 30 PMQs sessions saw him make 24 of these opening statements, of which 17 were solely focused on paying tribute to military personnel killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the remaining seven combined such tributes with other messages. Tributes to fallen servicepeople were also the predominant focus of Gordon Brown’s opening statements in his early PMQs sessions. The same was true for David Cameron, though he also combined such tributes with comments on a variety of other events including a royal wedding, an earthquake in New Zealand, and the rescue of trapped miners in Chile. Cameron’s successors thankfully had much less need to comment on military fatalities, but still made opening remarks frequently, and covered an even more varied range of topics that included terrorist incidents, natural disasters, anniversaries, saints’ days, and sports tournaments. 

Keir Starmer thus inherited a well-established pattern of PMs regularly using their opening answer at PMQs to comment on topical domestic and international events. This may reflect PMQs being one of their few parliamentary opportunities for such comments, given that research suggests modern PMs speak in the Commons far less often than they used to. These opening statements were broadly non-political, seeming to reflect the PM speaking as a leader of the nation, rather than of the government or a political party. PMs often used answers to ‘friendly’ backbench questions to make announcements or to praise the government, but the opening answer usually remained outside the political fray. The sessions we analysed here contained just one substantial exception to this pattern – in March 2023 Rishi Sunak opened PMQs by praising a list of government initiatives from the last week. 

Keir Starmer’s approach 

Starmer has approached his opening answer at PMQs very differently from his predecessors. The table above includes his first 24 PMQs sessions, up to 2 April 2025. Strikingly, he made an additional opening statement on every single occasion, never confining his answer to ‘This morning I had meetings …’ and so on. Moreover, his opening answers have been much longer than those we analysed from his predecessors, and around twice as long as those from his immediate predecessor, Sunak. 

But a more significant change has been in the content of Starmer’s opening remarks. He has still included the kind of topical non-partisan remarks used by his predecessors. However, he has also begun to include much more explicitly partisan, campaigning language, using his ‘engagements’ answer to set out the government’s main messages and (in his view) achievements for that week. 

This new approach was first visible on 11 September 2024: after several comments about the royal family, Starmer announced that the government would be introducing its Renters Rights Bill later that day, and said that ‘After years of inaction, this Government will oversee the biggest levelling up of renters’ rights in a generation, and I urge the whole House to get behind it.’ At his next session on 9 October, Starmer offered similar praise for the government’s Employment Rights Bill and a forthcoming international investment summit. He reverted to a more typical non-partisan approach for the remainder of 2024, but from the start of 2025 used successive sessions to communicate the government’s key message for the week, such as NHS reform, ‘AI opportunities’, and measures aimed at enhancing economic growth. He also adopted a subtler approach on 5 March, paying tribute to British servicepeople killed and wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq, in a thinly-veiled riposte to recent remarks from the US Vice President, JD Vance. 

Overall, it’s clear that Starmer is making more frequent opening remarks at PMQs, and using them in a much more partisan way, than any of his recent predecessors. This may reflect an intention to use the opening answer strategically to make the first move, and to start PMQs on the government’s terms. As this approach started a few months into Starmer’s first year in office, it may also have been shaped by Kemi Badenoch’s performance. Facing a Leader of the Opposition that has not been particularly challenging may have presented an opportunity to try a new tactic. It remains to be seen if this will develop into an established practice, or if Starmer is still experimenting with different PMQs strategies. 

About the authors 

Ruxandra Serban is a Lecturer (Teaching) in Comparative Politics at UCL. 

Tom Fleming is a Lecturer in British and Comparative Politics at UCL. 

Featured image: Keir Starmer MP, the Prime Minister (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by UK House of Commons.