It’s not a fair contest at PMQs – Keir Starmer is even beating Boris Johnson at the parliamentary theatrics

The Labour leader is good at the despatch box because he plays the part of a lawyer so well – not because he is one, writes John Rentoul

The PM has struggled against the leader of the opposition in recent weeks (Reuters)

In a court of law, Boris Johnson might have won today’s bout of prime minister’s questions (PMQs), but in the court of public opinion it was probably the opposite. It is a paradox that Keir Starmer, the lawyer, is better at the showbiz of the House of Commons than the prime minister, the comic journalist and after-dinner speaker.

The leader of the opposition is helped by Johnson’s insistence on calling him a lawyer. Today the prime minister said: “I understand the constraints of the profession in which he used to work.” He was trying to portray his opponent as the slippery advocate of whatever brief is put in front of him, but it doesn’t work.

All Johnson succeeds in doing is portraying the Labour leader as Columbo, the deceptively sharp detective who always gets the criminal by noticing things that others overlook and waiting until the guilty party has relaxed before saying: “Just one more thing.”

So when Starmer went through the numbers on track and trace and asked a mild question – “there’s a problem, isn’t there?” – it looked as if he had the prime minister cornered. It didn’t matter that it was all for show. Starmer had numbers that suggested that the test and trace system was missing two-thirds of the people with coronavirus in Britain.

Johnson blustered, saying the Labour leader has been “stunned” by the success of the test and trace operation, before realising, when Starmer asked the question again, that the numbers didn’t add up. The prime minister was so indignant that he accused Starmer of misleading the house, and had to be forced by Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, to rephrase this – in parliamentary language – as “inadvertently giving a wrong impression”.

But Johnson was right. Starmer was claiming that test and trace was a failure because it reached only one-third of estimated cases – but that is of estimated cases, and therefore the total includes large numbers of people who don’t know they have it. No system can be expected to identify them, and yet by now Columbo had made his point and was on to the next episode.

The star of the next story was the test and trace app, which ministers were once convinced was the key to controlling the virus. Columbo had noticed that it didn’t seem to be working, and asked, almost offhandedly: “Is it critical or not?”

Johnson expostulated and demanded that his opponent “name a single country in the world that has a functioning app”. Starmer didn’t bother with any cheap points about who gets to ask questions (“it’s not leader of the opposition’s questions”), and answered: “Germany.” This is a good answer because many have a tendency to think they do things better in Germany. It is not really true in this case, because the German app is poor at estimating distances; the German test and tracing system is better than ours because it has more efficient human testers and tracers.

But again, Columbo had put the suspect behind bars and was on to his third case: the case of the “dodgy” child poverty figures that the prime minister had made up the week before. Revelling in his portrayal as a cross between Columbo, Rumpole of the Bailey and Jonathan Sumption, Starmer said, “No more witnesses; I rest my case,” and invited the prime minister to “do the decent thing and correct the record”.

Johnson responded by making up some more numbers about child poverty, but Starmer had already summed him up: “He either dodges the question or gives dodgy answers.” It was a dramatic triumph. Calling another MP “dodgy” is just as unparliamentary as accusing them of misleading the house – Dennis Skinner, the Labour heckler, was once thrown out of the chamber for calling David Cameron “Dodgy Dave” – but Starmer got away with it because everyone thinks it is sort of true.

It was a brilliant performance by Starmer, but it was entirely theatrical and not at all lawyerly. If the proceedings had been presided over by a judge, the judge would have awarded all three cases to the prime minister. But Starmer won the day because he played the part of a lawyer to perfection.