These have not been the easiest few months for Keir Starmer since the unexpected success of the vaccination programme has had the knock-on effect of granting the prime minister a high level of immunity from any sort of criticism. No matter what Boris Johnson says or does, the Tories remain comfortably ahead in the polls. Getting party donors to pay for the Downing Street refurb? Not a problem. An unused £2.9m media suite in Downing Street? Because he’s worth it. Failing to disclose PPE contracts? No worries. Unilaterally rewriting the Northern Ireland protocol? Just a bit of fun. So no wonder the Labour leader has looked as if he’s been struggling at prime minister’s questions in recent weeks. He knows that no matter how well he performs, nothing he says will alter the political narrative. So why make the effort? What’s more, Johnson himself has sensed he is untouchable, barely even making the effort to acknowledge Starmer’s existence, let alone answering his questions. Even before all this no prime minister had done more to devalue PMQs than Boris. Now, with his narcissism unchecked, he has become even more insufferable. Yet whether it was Johnson’s hubris or Starmer raising his game – or possibly a bit of both – there were signs during this week’s session that maybe Boris has used up some of his reserves of goodwill and that he will have to work harder to justify his existence in future. The Labour leader certainly looked more up for a fight than of late as he opened with a question that was short and to the point. Who was more worthy of a pay rise? NHS nurses or Dominic Cummings? Boris sensed trouble and started waffling about how no one had done more for nurses than he – then again, no one had done less – and that they should be grateful for 1% when other public-sector workers were getting nothing. He was all heart. Starmer cut him short. The pay rise was effectively a pay cut, nurses were on average £800 worse off now than in 2010 and the prime minister had had no trouble fixing a 40% rise for his former adviser.
Now things began to turn surreal, with Johnson claiming that what nurses really wanted wasn’t more money so much as more colleagues with whom to moan about how badly paid they were. After all, what was the point in working long hours for little money if you didn’t have other workmates with whom to share the pain? With every word Boris uttered you could sense confidence returning to the Labour leader. This was the old Johnson, the one who couldn’t be bothered to prepare properly, the one who struggled to show empathy. This was the PM who was not nearly as intellectually agile as he liked to believe. The longer the exchanges went on the more convincing Keir sounded and the more feeble Boris’s bluster became. This felt like a rebooted Labour leader. Starmer 2.0. One who had the best soundbites and was still hungry to accumulate even the marginal gains of an easy win at PMQs. And wins didn’t come much easier than this. Every Tory backbencher knows that the government is out of step with public opinion and that it will have raise its pay offer to the nurses, so it is increasingly painful having a leader who, as with free school meals, stubbornly refuses to bow to the inevitable and change course. Starmer did miss a trick, however, by twice failing to pick up on Johnson’s accusations that the Labour party had voted against the government’s original bill to give nurses a 2.1% rise. It can’t have been that he was taken by surprise that Boris could come up with something so blatantly untrue; after all, making things up is the prime minister’s MO. So maybe he just had a massive brain fade and had genuinely forgotten what had happened. As it was, it was left to the shadow health minister, Jonathan Ashworth, to correct the record in a point of order at the end of the session – Labour had not voted against the bill, it had waved it through at both the second and third readings. It would have been a nice moment for Johnson to put the record straight but, sensing what was about to happen, he had timidly scuttled out of the Commons before Ashworth got the chance to speak. So we have yet to hear Boris apologise for misleading parliament. Or lying, as most of us call it.