Key points Sir Keir Starmer started by saying how shocked he was by the death of George Floyd. Referring to today’s Telegraph story, he asked who has been in charge of the UK’s coronavirus response up to now. Boris Johnson also condemned what happened to George Floyd. But he said people should protest in a peaceful way. He said he took full responsibility for the UK coronavirus strategy. He said people know that “with good British common sense” we can tackle this. Starmer said Johnson asks him to cooperate but didn’t reply to a letter he sent privately offering his cooperation on schools. He also said a survey at the weekend showed a huge fall in trust in the government. Johnson replied that he phoned Starmer after he got the letter and said Starmer did not criticise his policy. He said the public were following the government guidance. Starmer replied that he would publish his letter. Starmer said the government should have been working on a test and trace system for weeks. Dido Harding, who is in charge of the system, said it would not be fully ready until the end of June. Johnson accused Starmer of casting aspersions on the people behind the scheme and said it was up and running on 1 June. He said thousands of people were now self-isolating. Starmer said Johnson did not put a number on those being contacted and added that the number infected each day was far bigger than those tested. He said the system should contact 45,000 people a day. He quoted the UK Statistics Authority criticism of the government and asked the PM whether he could see how much damage was being done to trust? Johnson said Starmer continues to undermine trust in government and asked for some credit for the people involved. Starmer responded that Johnson was mistaking scrutiny for attacks. Starmer said he would like to support the government’s policy but Johnson made it difficult. He said the government said it would not relax the lockdown until the alert level was lowered. What was it now, and what was the R number? Johnson said the alert level did allow the lockdown to be relaxed, even though it had not been lowered. Starmer said scenes in parliament of MPs forming a kilometre-long queue to vote were “shameful” and excluded MPs who were shielding. If any other employer operated like this, it would be a clear and obvious case of discrimination. Will the PM stop this? Johnson said people around the country were having to queue. He said it was not unreasonable to expect MPs to do their job. He also said older MPs and those shielding should be allowed to vote by proxy. Snap verdict Sir Keir Starmer gave an interview to the Guardian that was interpreted by us, and others, as indicating a hardening of his stance against the government - less consensus-seeking, more condemnatory. Obviously in normal circumstances the Guardian is never wrong, but on the basis of what happened at PMQs today it is not clear that anything has changed. At PMQs Starmer has consistently presented himself as the most reasonable person at the dispatch box (more on that here, including why it worked for another opposition leader) and today he won the “talking sense” competition quite comfortably. It wasn’t as if the questions were, on their own, especially memorable. But Starmer does tend to specialise in loaded questions to which there is no safe or easy answer (“when did you stop beating your wife?” questions, as I think they are known at the bar), and Johnson has yet to develop any plausible response mechanism. At their last PMQs he tried responding with promises (the “world-beating” test and trace system). We had a flash of that when Johnson pledged to ensure all test results are turned around within 24 hours by the end of the month (there may well be some clarification of quite what this involves at the lobby briefing) but mostly, in his exchanges with Starmer, Johnson resorted to criticising the opposition leader for – well, opposing the government. He accused Starmer of launching “endless attacks on public trust and confidence” and of “casting aspersions” on the good character of people working on test and trace (some of whom are spending much of their time watching Netflix because they don’t have enough to do, according to the BBC). This is a lame form of parliamentary defence at the best of times. But given that the PM is facing criticism for not even doing his own job properly, it was unwise to invest so much in attacking Starmer for doing his.