Key points
Starmer said last week the PM talked about the “apparent success” of the government’s approach. But death numbers are the highest in Europe, and the second highest in the world. He said this is not a success and asked him how it came to that? Johnson quoted a piece by Prof David Spiegelhalter in the Guardian about comparing death rates and added that there will be a time to look at what went wrong.
Starmer said why has it taken so long to improve the situation in care homes. Johnson responded that there had been a “palpable improvement”.
Starmer said testing numbers have fallen back since last week, when the government hit its 100,000 a day target. What was so special about that day? Johnson said Starmer was right to pay tribute to the work done on this last week and added the ambition was now to ramp up testing to 200,000 a day.
Starmer replied that having a target wasn’t a strategy. Testing, tracing and isolating is key – but this was abandoned. Why was contact tracing abandoned in mid-March and not restarted sooner? Johnson said in mid-March capacity did not meet demand but now there is a team that will be able to track and trace hundreds of thousands of people across the country.
Starmer turned to PPE, saying 40% of docs had to buy it themselves or rely on donations. This will get worse when people return to work. Johnson said the shortages have been “enraging” but added supply will be ramped up now and there had been no “stock outs”.
Starmer said people will need reassurance it will be safe to return to work and send their children to school. Will Johnson answer MPs’ questions about his plan on Monday. Johnson said there will be a statement on Monday. But he is doing his announcement on Sunday because he wants some of these measures to start on Monday.
Snap verdict
In a pre-Covid PMQs a Tory prime minister who was riding high in the opinion polls and who was returning to the House of Commons after an illness that left him in intensive care would have been welcomed by such a wall of noise that it would have been hard for any opposition leader to make much of a mark. But, of course, there is no chance of PMQs resuming its shouting match status any time soon (one of the few benefits of this ghastly crisis) and instead Boris Johnson was left looking exposed and diminished as he faced Keir Starmer for the first time.
As had been widely expected, Starmer was impressive - focused, calm, and rational. His interventions today were crisper than in his previous two outings (probably an improvement), and he always ended with a very direct question, simple yet incriminating. No doubt he could manage in a rowdy Commons, but the court room silence seems to suit him better, and the overall impression left by the encounter was of a rather floundering prime minister struggling to respond to a grown-up channelling the questions a critical nation wants answered.
Another difficulty for the PM in Zoom PMQs is that he can’t pick the brains of the specialist minister sitting alongside him. Prime ministers are normally more reliant on prompts from colleagues at PMQs than people realise, and Johnson looked particular in need of verbal assistance from Matt Hancock when asked about PPE.
In normal PMQs, a struggling PM would resort to sloganising, and hope the backbench noise machine might do the rest, but with that no longer an option it did seem as if Johnson was more reliant on making points of substance. He could not answer Starmer’s questions easily (they were designed to be hard to answer - at least, hard to answer without admitting gross negligence), but he did show some leg on a public inquiry, and provided a relatively revealing answer about why he is making the lockdown announcement on Sunday.
Starmer will be pleased with how the exchanges went. But if the new format militates against sloganising, then that is potentially a problem for the leader of the opposition too. At his first PMQs against Tony Blair, David Cameron came out with the memorable line about how Blair “was the future once” - a soundbite and a slogan, but a good one, that defined Cameron successfully. A week today, we will remember that Starmer looked the part at his first PMQs, but we are less likely to remember what he actually said.
