It wasn’t the most orthodox of openings to prime minister’s questions, with Tory MP Sir David Amess plugging his new book – out next week – and asking whether Boris Johnson agreed with his central proposition that the country had not voted for the Conservatives at the last election because it believed the party would be good at dealing with the coronavirus, but because it wanted “to get Brexit done”. Boris was caught cold and was surprisingly quick to agree. Thereby implicitly admitting that the government’s response to the pandemic had become increasingly clueless. None of which was lost on Keir Starmer, who challenged Johnson on the out-of-date spreadsheets that led to 16,000 cases being left out of official Covid figures and another 48,000 people not being warned they had been in contact with the virus. Lives had been put at risk, said the Labour leader. It does no harm to sometimes point out the obvious.
Johnson looked downbeat, defeated even, from the very start. His insistence during his party conference speech the day before that he had “rediscovered his mojo” had looked like hollow rhetoric then, and now seemed more so in the flesh. None of this is what Boris had ever wanted or planned. He had signed up for the glory and the applause. Not to see the country through its biggest health crisis in 100 years. Six months in and he’s all but out of ideas. He knows that. And more importantly his own backbenchers know that. Even though the whips have tried to get MPs to sound more enthusiastic, no one is fooled. PMQs has become as excruciating for the Tory ground troops as it is for Johnson. Boris could barely raise his eyes as he mumbled something about the missing test results being a technical issue that had now been resolved. Nothing to see here, time to move on. The Labour leader is now used to the prime minister dodging questions but even he seemed taken aback by such a lacklustre reply, utterly devoid of any personal responsibility. This was serious, he explained. Some of the data that had gone missing was from two and a half weeks earlier. Once again the prime minister was almost mute. Starmer was making a big deal out of not very much. All the epidemiology pointed to the fact that all the missing cases and contacts had come from areas where we already knew there was a high incidence of the virus. So if a few more people in the north-west or the north-east happened to die or be exposed to the disease then there was no real harm done. After all, they’d probably have caught the disease at some point anyway. What would have been worrying was if the disease was found to have spread to areas that weren’t already in local lockdowns. Let them eat cake. What followed wasn’t pretty for the prime minister. The missing contacts weren’t an isolated case, Starmer pointed out. They were just part of a series of ongoing problems with the test-and-trace system. Worse still, the government was like a rabbit in the headlights, unable to react to a changing situation. Local lockdowns might have seemed like a good idea a month or so ago – and Labour had been first to back the government on them – but there was now clear evidence that they weren’t working. Infections in 19 out of 20 areas had actually gone up since lockdowns had been introduced. So something needed to change. What needed to change, said Boris, was Labour continually heckling from the sidelines and failing to offer support. Did Labour actually support the “rule of six” or not? The sense of deja vu was deadening. Whenever he’s on the ropes and has no answers, the only way Boris knows how to respond is to go on the offensive and start asking questions himself. On another day, the speaker might have intervened and pointed out that the session was actually an opportunity for questions to be asked of the prime minister. “Yes, we do support the rule of six,” said Starmer. At least one party leader is capable of giving a straight answer to a straight question. The only reason Labour had abstained on the vote the day before was because they had known it was going to pass anyway. “Now if the prime minister would just listen to the questions, we might get on a little better.” What was really at stake here was that there was no consistency in any of the rules. Johnson’s own constituency of Hillingdon had a greater incidence of the virus than some other areas that had been put under local lockdown.
And Labour had been happy enough to go along with the 10pm curfew initially because it had assumed the government must have some scientific evidence to back it up. Starmer’s mistake had been to treat the prime minister as a proper grown-up. So now he wanted to see the evidence before he continued to offer his support, as there was little sign the curfew was having the desired effect. If Johnson had the data to prove that things would have been even worse than they already were, then by all means publish it. We were in the grip of a pandemic and the government must be prepared to change course when necessary. Everyone made mistakes in a fast-moving situation; it was the failure to acknowledge these mistakes and react to them that was unforgivable. Boris chuntered on, but by now no one was listening. Rather there was a general feeling of futility on both sides of the house. The Tories despair of a leader who gets weaker with each outing and no longer appears to really want the job. Nor do Labour take much satisfaction from Starmer out-thinking and out-performing Johnson. Partly because his victory is already priced in, but also because the stakes are too high. People are dying because of the decisions being taken. PMQs used to be part-pantomime, with moments of high comedy. Now it is just pure tragedy. Even though the leading actor is a clown who can’t even be trusted to tell the Commons his own name.