Is Keir Starmer PM already? Rishi Sunak was asking him the questions...

Stephen Flynn of the SNP looked from Tory to Labour benches, from man to pig and back again, and ‘already it was impossible to say which was which’, writes John Rentoul

Starmer lectured the prime minister on the meaning of fiscal responsibility (Reuters)

It is one of the oldest debating tactics in Prime Minister’s Questions: the leader of the opposition says that if the prime minister wants to ask him questions, he is quite happy to swap places.

Sometimes the speaker even joins in the game, as Sir Lindsay Hoyle did today, and reminds the prime minister that he should be answering the questions, not asking them.

Keir Starmer, fresh from his trip to the Guru Blair, treated Rishi Sunak’s question with a lighter touch than the leaden humour we have been used to of late. “With his time away, he’s forgotten how this works,” Starmer said, referring to his opponent’s absences from the two previous sessions.

But this time the old joke had more substance to it. Starmer praised the prime minister for adopting Labour’s NHS workforce plan. There was just one problem, he said, which is that Sunak hadn’t set out how he was going to pay for it. Turning the tables, Prime Minister Starmer asked Leader of the Opposition Sunak: “Where’s the money coming from?”

Sunak retreated into the hedge of civil service jargon. His plan had been welcomed by no fewer than 43 NHS “stakeholders”, he said, defensively.

Starmer then drove the point home by lecturing the prime minister on the meaning of fiscal responsibility.

The prime ministerial aura that Starmer still wore from his meeting with Tony Blair so impressed Stephen Flynn, the leader of the Scottish National Party in the Commons, that he looked from man to pig and from pig to man and failed to tell which was which. Now that Labour had adopted the Conservative policy of limiting benefits to two children, said Pete Wishart, his SNP colleague, the two parties might as well sit together on one big bench on the government side.

With Labour and Tories swapping policies and metaphorically swapping places, the differences that Starmer and Sunak argued over became small. Small, but still significant, because the question that Sunak asked Starmer – not once but twice – was why he wouldn’t urge NHS doctors to go back to work.

It was a good question, and it took the wind out of Starmer’s attack on rising waiting lists. All the government’s efforts to rebuild the NHS were “starting to make a difference”, Sunak said, but they were “held up by industrial action in the NHS”. As I argued at the weekend, this is Starmer’s big remaining weakness in an otherwise increasingly strong and prime ministerial display.

But because Starmer won’t tell the doctors to accept the kind of pay offer that he would be making if he really were prime minister, Sunak landed a blow by telling the Labour leader to “stop taking advice from his friends outside and un-glue himself from the fence”.

Otherwise, the narcissism of small differences produced some good knockabout, but not so much serious debate. Sunak said that it was well known that he was in favour of learning maths until the age of 18, but that Starmer was making “a very strong case for doing maths all the way to 61”.

The Labour leader pointed out that Sunak had got his maths wrong, because he was 60, but that made him look sensitive about his age.

What was surprising about the last Prime Minister’s Questions before the summer recess was how evenly matched it was; how easy it was to imagine the principals changing places; and yet how confident Sunak seemed – despite being so far behind in the opinion polls that Daniel Finkelstein of The Times has suggested that he should go for an early election next year in an attempt to limit the Tories’ losses.