Keir Starmer’s clash with the prime minister over NHS pay was boring, but it still made Boris Johnson squirm

‘Who does the prime minister think deserves a pay rise more: an NHS nurse or Dominic Cummings?’ The Labour leader’s tactic in today’s PMQs was simple, repetitive and effective, says John Rentoul

Keir Starmer brought his drum to PMQs again (PA)

It was boring for journalists, but highly effective for Keir Starmer. He and Boris Johnson repeated lines that were tediously familiar to the odd people who follow politics closely. The Labour leader has mentioned Dominic Cummings’s pay rise many times before, but this time he found a new way of doing it.

“Who does the prime minister think deserves a pay rise more: an NHS nurse or Dominic Cummings?” Simple, repetitive, and very uncomfortable for Johnson.

Starmer didn’t ask about the £22bn wasted on NHS Test and Trace, which was the new news this morning – or is it £37bn? Nobody really knows or cares. He was quite right not to mention it. Labour has made some decent mileage out of Conservative cronyism in handing out contracts, but it is all a bit complicated. It may be that test and trace simply cannot work (Labour didn’t say that at the time) or that it could work only if even more numberless billions were spent on it (which Labour did sometimes imply).

Much easier for Starmer to stick to the absolutely safe and simple ground of paying NHS heroes more. You could say it is a sign of weakness for Labour to stick to its home territory, but the whole point of having an issue on which the voters trust the party is that Starmer ought to make use of it. There are local elections coming up, which are of course very little to do with the NHS, but if the party has a good drum it needs to bang it.

The prime minister squirmed slightly but put up a decent fight. He replied to the Labour leader with a wall of statistics. One of my abiding memories as a political journalist is of Margaret Thatcher reciting the numbers of how many more nurses and doctors there were in the NHS whenever Neil Kinnock accused her of underfunding it, which was often.

Nothing changes while the Conservatives are in government. Labour attacks them for being mean to the NHS; they defend themselves by saying they are spending more on it than ever before. Johnson had learned some of his numbers so well today that he used many of them more than once. There are 10,600 more nurses in the NHS than a year ago, he said, as if this were an answer to why they should have only a 1 per cent pay offer. Is the implication that the country can afford to lose a few by giving them an insulting pay rise and still reach the target of 50,000 more nurses promised in the manifesto? It seemed so, because Johnson also boasted that nursing applications were up by a third.

The prime minister was also proud that there were 6,500 more doctors and 49,000 more NHS staff altogether. Presumably many of these are people who stayed on or rejoined in order to help out with the coronavirus, in which case a 1 per cent pay rise hardly seems the right response.

Beyond that, there wasn’t much more that Johnson could do. He hinted that when he looks at what the pay review body has to say – “exceptionally” – about nurses, the 1 per cent figure may be revised. Presumably an announcement is imminent, even though the pay review body isn’t due to pronounce until after the local elections; but there are details to be sorted out and chancellors to be squared. If I know the civil service, they will be telling the prime minister that they’ll have a higher pay rise sorted out “after Easter” – to which he will reply by asking for how many more sessions of PMQs they expect him to go on defending the indefensible. No wonder Johnson ended rather feebly by using the same line he used last week: “We vaccinate; he vacillates.”

So Keir Starmer didn’t have to be very interesting, or say anything new, or funny. And he didn’t. He maintained a single note of tetchy indignation throughout all six questions, with an unmistakable touch of self-regard: “When I clapped for carers, I meant it.” But everyone thinks the nurses should get more than a 1 per cent rise; they trust Labour on the NHS; and they think the Tories are mean. If Starmer’s got a drum, he has to bang it.