Keir Starmer has shown that he is ‘Ready for Rishi’

Portraying Boris Johnson as the hapless prisoner of the real power in the land was an effective way of diminishing the prime minister, writes John Rentoul

Rishi Sunak at PMQs (AFP via Getty Images)

The expected fall of Boris Johnson poses an exquisite problem for Keir Starmer. The Labour Party has a terror of what happened 30 years ago, when Neil Kinnock lost the 1992 election, which he had been expected to win. Labour had failed to adjust to the departure of Margaret Thatcher, continuing to attack “Thatcherism” without realising how attractive John Major’s moderate pragmatism was to its voters.

Starmer is determined not to make that mistake again. Hence today’s CEQs: Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Questions. Starmer treated Johnson as the mere spokesperson for the next prime minister, who was sitting, masked, several places along the government front bench.

Starmer completely ignored Johnson’s announcement of the end of coronavirus restrictions and directed all his six questions at the chancellor. First he asked about fraud. This was ostensibly an attack on Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, who at the weekend got himself into a tangle by appearing to say that people didn’t think fraud was a crime. But it was really aimed at Sunak, whose write-off of £4bn of business support during the pandemic has touched a nerve.