Keir Starmer made Boris Johnson look slow and bumbling at PMQs

The Labour leader was sharp and effective while quizzing the prime minister in the Commons, writes John Rentoul

The Labour leader raised his game after last week’s embarrassment (Reuters TV)

Keir Starmer ought to have a bad week more often. Last week’s mistake during PMQs, when he lost his temper in self-righteous indignation because he failed to pay attention to what Boris Johnson was actually saying, prompted him to raise his game today. This time he was sharp, quick, relaxed and effective. 

He asked if the prime minister could give companies the certainty of knowing that business rate relief would be extended beyond March. You will have to wait for the Budget, Johnson predictably replied. 

“Businesses don’t work as slowly as the prime minister,” responded Starmer, driving home the message that Johnson has been consistently too slow in his handling of the coronavirus. “He doesn’t need to leave everything to the 11th minute.” He meant the 11th hour – to respond to crises at the 11th minute of the hour would normally be considered quite fast – but the point was nevertheless underscored.  

The prime minister, equally predictably, moved on to his prepared counter-attack, sarcastically welcoming the conversion of the Labour Party to the cause of business, and pointing out that Starmer had recently stood on a manifesto promising to dismantle capitalism. 

Starmer had seen that one coming. “We all know what the prime minister said he wants to do to business,” he said. We all do, indeed, and the barb was so much more effective for not spelling it out. 

Starmer quickly moved on to asking for the ban on evictions, which is due to expire in 11 days’ time, to be extended. Last time, the government left it to the last moment – not quite the 11th hour – to extend the ban. Johnson replied with that silly phrase about “putting our arms around the British people” which always strikes a wrong note at a time of social distancing, and demanded to know why Starmer wasn’t getting behind the government, backing business and backing the British people. 

Starmer said he wasn’t going to “take lectures from someone who”, which is another of my least favourite pieces of political boilerplate, and then listed three of the worst things he could think of that Johnson has ever done. The first was that he “wrote two versions of every column he ever wrote as a journalist”, which he did once and a rigorous intellectual exercise it was too, but I suppose it is something that comes up in focus groups, symbolising the prime minister’s lack of constancy of principle.

The second was that he had proposed Donald Trump for a Nobel peace prize; and the third was that he gave Dominic Cummings a pay rise. None of those charges had anything to do with anything – as Starmer admitted when he said, “but back to the question...” – but they rang all the Pavlovian bells. 

When he did go “back to the question”, it was, predictably, about borders. Equally predictably, Starmer did not mention the fuss that some Conservative MPs are making about the disproportionate 10-year jail sentences with which Matt Hancock, the health secretary, grabbed all the headlines this morning. Starmer knows that the voters he is trying to impress will tend to think that 10 years in jail is much too soft for the crime of bringing the plague to our airports. So he asked about an Oxford University study that ranked countries by the severity of their coronavirus border restrictions and put the UK 34th. 

Johnson hardly knew which way to turn, first boasting that he had got the numbers coming into the country down from the usual 250,000 a day to 20,000 now – of whom 5,000 are “involved in” bringing in essentials – and then criticising Starmer for wanting to “cut this country off from the world”. That is precisely what the great British public wants, so that wrapped up Prime Minister’s Questions nicely for Starmer. “No further questions, your honour,” he could have said.

He didn’t, of course. He simply laid out Labour’s proposals, to show how constructive he was being. Never mind that they amounted to huge extra spending on supporting businesses, and having slightly less “open” borders than the government; they sounded good. 

That left Johnson, who seemed unprepared and looked the part, with his shirt half untucked, to waffle about Labour’s “bandwagoneering” and to make feeble use of the words of Charles Falconer, the shadow attorney general, who said that the coronavirus crisis was the “gift that keeps giving” for lawyers. It wouldn’t have been a great line of attack for use on the Tory party’s social media clips in any case, but the prime minister rendered it unusable by addressing his remarks to “Mr Crisis” and correcting himself to “Mr Speaker”. 

Starmer has had a bad week with some journalists commenting on his failure to make greater headway against a government riding high on the success of the vaccines programme, leavened by disparaging comments from anonymous MPs. But most Labour MPs I speak to think he’s doing a good job, and certainly don’t think anyone else could do a better one. Today’s short, sharp and effective performance in the Commons will have reinforced their view.