Keir Starmer will miss the chance to challenge Boris Johnson at the first prime minister’s questions of 2022, after the Labour leader tested positive for Covid. He will self-isolate and his deputy, Angela Rayner, will stand in at the dispatch box instead at 3pm. Starmer has been doing daily lateral flow tests and on Wednesday the result came back positive. It is his sixth period of self-isolation since the pandemic began. He last tested positive in October, forcing him to miss PMQs and the chance to respond to the budget.
Fresh from giving a new year’s speech in central Birmingham setting out Labour’s strategy for 2022, Starmer will have been keen to keep pressure up on the government given the Conservatives’ waning poll ratings after a damaging series of sleaze scandals. On Tuesday, he said alleged rule-breaking including at Christmas parties across Whitehall during December 2020 meant ministers had lost “the moral right to set those rules”. The speech was attended by about two dozen people, including several local Labour MPs sat socially distanced in the audience. Starmer is believed to have visited nearby constituencies afterwards. Before Starmer’s last positive test three months ago, he was also forced to isolate in July 2021 after one of his children tested positive, and in January 2021 after being identified as a “close contact” of someone who caught the virus. He also went into isolation in December 2020 when a staff member in his private office contracted Covid, and September 2020 while someone in his household had symptoms and awaited a test result. NHS guidance says anyone who catches Covid should notify all those with whom they have been in close contact in the past 48 hours – but those people do not need to isolate unless contacted by test and trace or they develop symptoms. Cases of the virus in Britain have rocketed in recent weeks as the Omicron variant, which scientists say is more transmissible, spread through the country. The highest daily number of new infections in the UK was reported on Tuesday, when 218,724 people tested positive for Covid. Johnson has resisted imposing further restrictions in England, putting the nation out of step with leaders of the devolved administrations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The prime minister has himself been forced to self-isolate before, but tried to avoid doing so in July 2021 after he and chancellor, Rishi Sunak, came into close contact with the health secretary, Sajid Javid, who later tested positive for Covid. Johnson and Sunak initially said they were part of a pilot testing scheme allowing them to avoid isolating, but U-turned after an outcry from members of the public and backbench Conservative MPs.