We haven’t seen much of Boris Johnson over the past week. In fact we haven’t seen him at all; not even for a single Downing Street press conference. Far too much like hard work. He’s even making the notoriously lazy David Cameron look industrious by comparison. And Dave wasn’t prime minister during the worst global health crisis in 100 years. Now, though, things have become a little clearer. In between taking Dilyn for a walk in the park and avoiding changing his baby’s nappies, Boris has been breaking the habit of a lifetime by actually doing some preparation. After two weeks of humiliation at the despatch box during prime minister’s questions, Boris had been taking lessons in how not to appear like a total car crash in front of a top QC.
The message that Boris appeared to have been given was for him to be more himself. The downside to this, though, is that the real Boris is actually rather unpleasant. The popular, fun-loving image has only ever been a veneer. Deep down, Boris is needy and insecure. Character traits that he hates in himself and finds impossible to accept, so his first instinct when cornered is to lash out. So that was the Boris we got at this week’s PMQs. Pugnacious, ungracious, blustering, and not totally coherent. For the extra Tory backbenchers who had been bussed in for the occasion – the party high command feel Boris performs best when there is a home audience – this was an undoubted improvement on what had gone before when only a surly incompetence had been on view. But it was still a long way short of what most people in the country would have wanted from their leader at such a time. Even when he is being himself, Boris just isn’t that good when up against someone like Keir Starmer, who is used to building a case based on the evidence. The Labour leader began on care homes. How did the government square its insistence that it had “thrown a protective ring around care homes” with the evidence given to the health select committee by the chief executive of Care England that countless patients had been booted out of hospital without any testing for the coronavirus?
“As he knows full well, er, the, er, dist … ” Boris began, struggling to complete a meaningful sentence. We never did get to find out what the “dist” was. His language was as much of a mess as his hair. But just as it seemed the prime minister was reverting to one of his other default settings of winging it, he glanced at his notes for a better line of attack. Aha, he said. No one had been released into care homes without a clinician signing them out. Here we got a first view of the government’s defence in the coming public inquiry. The government had never intended the wrong people to be released from hospitals and if they had been, then it was all down to doctor error. In five years’ time it will turn out that all the excess care home deaths were down to one doctor who has also conveniently died of the coronavirus, and nothing to do with any decisions the government had made. There were times during the following exchanges when Starmer appeared rather unsettled by this new bullish, sollipsistic Boris – it was the height of cheek to accuse Starmer of feigning ignorance, when the prime minister was so busy feigning intelligence. At one point Matt Hancock started joining in – “and you bought your mum a £10m donkey sanctuary, so there” – before the Speaker invited him to either shut up or sod off. Matt slumped into a five-year-old’s strop and stared angrily at the ground. Not that Boris appeared particularly grateful for the health secretary’s intervention – he dislikes toadies as much as those who stand up to him – as he promptly threw him under a bus by insisting that the test and trace programme would be fully operational by 1 June. There was no word on whether Matt’s App would also be up and running, but given that the government has missed almost every deadline it has set for itself – and lied about the ones it has met – no one was holding their breath. Boris had yet again set himself and his health secretary up to fail. Although Starmer wasn’t getting things all his own way, there was no doubt he was still getting the better of every argument. There’s something about the poise and command of the Labour leader that seems to get under the prime minister’s skin. As if he knows that he will never come close to having his integrity or intellect. At one point Boris nearly lost it completely by demanding that Keir stop being so negative. How about some applause for the people who hadn’t died? “I’m sorry, but 34,000 dead is negative,” Starmer observed. Especially as the real figure was north of 50,000, many of which were totally avoidable. One could forgive a lot if Boris was even able to come close to an apology, but now he can’t even admit that there is a correlation between an effective test-and-trace system and a further easing of lockdown measures. There again, he can’t bring himself to say how many children he has, so what hope is there? It was with the last two questions that Starmer left Boris hopelessly exposed. How did the government justify the £624 visa surcharge on so many overseas workers who had done so much to keep the NHS running more or less smoothly? Boris merely shrugged. They were a useful source of revenue. Besides, they were lucky to have a job in which some of them could say they had been able to save the life of the prime minister. Put that way, Luis and Jenny should have been thanking him for fleecing them for more cash rather than the other way round. Such is his narcissism, Boris had no idea how petty and spiteful he sounded.
The rest of PMQs was something of a non-event. Boris had clearly come prepared to see off Keir and only had bog-standard, drivel-strewn non-answers for everyone else. He left the chamber with a swagger. Before he had twice lost on a knockout; now he had just been comprehensively outclassed on points. And back in Downing Street, Classic Dom would be telling him that was another overwhelming victory. • This article was amended on 21 May 2020 to correct the figure for the NHS surcharge levied on migrant workers from outside the European Economic Area.