The comparison was not flattering. On Tuesday night Boris Johnson gave us his third-rate Winston Churchill impression on TV; now Keir Starmer has given his reply. And it wasn’t just Labour supporters wishing Starmer was running the country: there are plenty of Tory MPs who must secretly harbour similar feelings. Boris looks and sounds like an entitled impostor. Keir looks and sounds like the real deal. Someone prepared to put the country first but not afraid to showcase the shortcomings of a Tory government that has lurched from cock-up to crisis throughout the pandemic. This was serious, sharp-focused Keir, pointing out the abject failure of test and trace and the lack of a plan B for the economy. The coronavirus may have been unavoidable but there had been nothing inevitable about its consequences: 55,000 dead and counting.
Earlier we had seen a rather more soft-focused, gentle Keir. Cue piano music played in a minor chord. Ordinary members of the public and NHS workers relating the hardships they have faced over the past few months. Keir standing next to a war memorial, declaring his love and pride in the UK. How he was the first person from his family to go to university and went on to become the head of the Crown Prosecution Service. But how there were still too many injustices holding people back and how Labour under his leadership was determined to put things right and win back the support of the country. It ended with Keir standing outside the ordinary home in Oxted, Surrey, where he had grown up. All that was missing for the full-on tear-jerker were the distressed donkeys that his parents had once looked after. But that was just a minor quibble, for as Starmer’s first party political broadcast it could hardly have been bettered. The message was clear. He wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn. And he certainly wasn’t Boris Johnson. There again, that last bit didn’t come as too much of a surprise as it’s not entirely clear if even Johnson knows who Johnson is these days, given that his performances are becoming increasingly erratic and confused. Never more so than at prime minister’s questions, where Starmer continues to make the mistake of overestimating Johnson’s real emotional age. He used to treat Boris as a 10-year-old, only for Johnson to act like a toddler. Now Keir has lowered his sights and treats him as a toddler, Boris has regressed further into a pre-verbal baby. At this rate of decline it won’t be long before we have a prime minister who has yet to be born. Starmer’s new line of attack at PMQs is to keep things as simple as possible for Johnson. So he started by pointing out that three months ago the prime minister had said the test-and-trace system could be a real game-changer for the country. Yesterday he had said the opposite: that test and trace had very little or nothing to do with the spread of transmission of the disease. Both statements couldn’t be correct, so which one was he standing by today? Whereupon Boris gave a reply that can’t even have made any sense to him. Or if it did, then he’s further gone than anyone imagined. Because what he said was that the virus was transmitted from human to human so test and trace was merely both a total sideshow and vitally important in informing the indecisive action he had taken the day before. At least that’s what I think he said. I’ve played back his answer several times now and I’m still none the wiser. I’ve got more sense from listening to a Pingu cartoon. To be fair so had Starmer, who merely repeated the question and got a similar incoherent response. So the Labour leader tried a new tack, based on the assumption that the whole world – with the possible exception of Boris – believed that test and trace was crucial to containing the virus. So last week the prime minister had admitted there was a problem with it. Dido Harding had said it was due to a lack of capacity, the health secretary had said the problem was over demand. Which was it? Now things took an even more surreal turn with Boris declaring any attack on Typhoid Dido to be both unjustified and unseemly. It was almost medieval in tone and probably the first time on record that Johnson has ever sought to defend a woman’s honour. And also totally bizarre, as what is really unseemly is that an unelected Tory peer with a track record of mismanagement and failure should have been given the job as head of test and trace without even an interview. He didn’t even bother to try to defend his health secretary. Then again, Matt Hancock is now everybody’s Door Matt. The longer PMQs went on the more staccato Boris’s sentences became. He would be delivering 500,000 tests a day by the end of October – a figure not even he and Typhoid Dido believe – even though he had just said that test and trace was a complete waste of time. He yet again blamed the opposition for daring to oppose, rather than delivering praise for his achievements.
Boris also managed to accuse Starmer of not backing the NHS – the Labour leader’s wife works for it – while again happily outsourcing the test-and-trace operations to Serco and other private companies. He failed to grasp why the demand for tests should have increased when schools went back. He was unable to give any details on what financial help the government might be planning to make to businesses affected by the latest restrictions. Most tellingly of all, though, he made no reference whatsoever to the new contact-tracing app the government was supposed to be bringing in later this week. Presumably he already knows it doesn’t work. Much like the last one. By the end, it wasn’t just the Labour leader who was looking bemused. It was MPs from both sides. The knowledge that this hadn’t even been Boris at his worst only added to the pathos. Never has a prime minister with an 80-seat majority looked so alone. A man out of touch with his country, his party and most of all himself. A man who wasted weeks picking an unnecessary fight with the EU over the internal market bill when his attention should have been fully focused on the coronavirus. Still, at least it would be Michael Gove who would have to explain about the 7,000-long lorry queues later in the afternoon. Right now, it was all he could do to take pleasure in the small victories.