Pummelling Rishi Sunak with Labour’s NHS record is working for Keir Starmer

Prime Minister’s Questions revealed how effective a leader of the opposition who is proud of the last Labour government could be, writes John Rentoul

Starmer ended up by asking a good, if rhetorical, question (PA)

For a long time, the Labour Party has tried to run away from its record. For five years it had a leader who explicitly repudiated everything that New Labour stood for. Today we saw what a mistake that had been. Keir Starmer devoted all his questions to the prime minister to the proposition that the last Labour government had fixed the NHS, and the Conservatives had broken it.

The Labour leader started by pointing out that in all the 13 years of the last Labour government there had been no national NHS strikes, and worked his way, barrister-style, through the reduction of waiting lists achieved by 2010 and in particular the two-week target for suspected cancer cases to be seen by a specialist, which is now exceeded in 50,000 cases. He asked: “When will cancer patients get the certainty of quick care that they got under Labour?”

Starmer ended up by asking a good, if rhetorical, question: is the best that Rishi Sunak can offer people the hope that at some point the government might stop making things worse?

Sunak didn’t have any answers, but he delivered his non-answers well. Considering what a one-sided contest it should have been, the prime minister gave a good impression of someone who was winning the argument. A lot of it was an illusion: he looks keener than Starmer, and is more fluent, more aggressive and more partisan while managing to appear utterly reasonable.

Sunak threw everything he had at his defence, good arguments and bad, in the hope that something would stop the hail of derision from the other side. He pointed out that the NHS had been set back by the pandemic, which is true, although it doesn’t deal with why it was in such a poor state before the virus. He said that if we had listened to Starmer, “we would still be in lockdown”, which is absurd. There were a few moments during the pandemic when the Labour leader called for longer or stricter restrictions, but the differences between government and opposition were marginal.

The whole of Prime Minister’s Questions was a masterclass in defensive politics from Sunak. He started by responding to the first question, from Cat Smith, the Labour backbencher, who asked how long he had to wait for his last NHS dentist’s appointment, by making a pre-emptive statement: “I have used independent health care in the past; I am registered with an NHS GP.”

I understand that Starmer wasn’t going to ask about Sunak’s private healthcare – after the prime minister had clumsily refused to answer Laura Kuenssberg’s question on BBC TV on Sunday – but that was enough to fend off questions from journalists to Sunak’s spokesperson after the Commons clashes. In the chamber, the Labour leader acknowledged the prime minister’s clarification by welcoming him to the club of normal people who have to hold on the phone at 8am to try to book a GP appointment.

It was unusual to see the opposition side of the Commons so united in high and justified indignation. The NHS may be Labour’s comfort zone, but in the past this has been more about claiming to be “the party of the NHS” because it founded it in 1948. Today was something more interesting: a party proud of its recent record in government.

This prompted the return of the art of the well-timed heckle, a skill that has been in abeyance in recent years. When Sunak said “What the NHS doesn’t need is…” There was a Labour shout of “You!” Sunak served up another lob for a smash when he said, talking about people’s worries about whether an ambulance would come if they dialled 999: “What’s terrifying is…” There was a chorus of “You!” this time.

After Sunak answered Keir Starmer’s last question with a peroration accusing the Labour leader of being “focused on petty politics” while he, Sunak, was “delivering for Britain”, a loud voice from the opposition benches said: “Useless.”

So it was, but Sunak had managed to turn what should have been a disastrous rout into something that might have looked like a draw. That was a striking achievement, and allowed him to declare that he was “proud to come from an NHS family” without sounding ridiculous.

But the important lesson of today’s clashes was that a Labour leader who is proud of the record of the last Labour government is going to have the upper hand.