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A The day that offered the country so much hope in a relentlessly bleak year was one in which party politics was put on hold. At least that was the view taken by Keir Starmer in appropriately tempered questions from a prime minister. He began, as did Boris Johnson, by expressing his gratitude to scientists at Pfizer / BioNTech and the Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency for developing the coronavirus vaccine and for the speed at which it had been licensed, before asking about the details of who would do it. Be the first 400,000 people to get the puncture when the first doses arrive later this week.
And at first it seemed – unusual, I know – that Johnson was taking a serious question seriously. There was none of the patriotism that some of his ministers had fallen prey to. Accident-prone Alok Sharma tweeted that “for years to come we will remember this moment as the day the UK led humanity’s charge against this disease.” Er, I think not. The vaccine was developed by a Turkish immigrant couple in collaboration with a German pharmaceutical company. Matt Hancock, a late convert to Brexit, meanwhile, claimed that it was only because the UK had left the EU that it had managed to get the vaccine approved. Which was false.
Instead, Boris was much more cautious in his approach, partly because he doesn’t know the details (he’s only had 10 months to figure out how different doses of the vaccine could be implemented), but also because he didn’t want every country to start acting like If suddenly we were all clear This was just the beginning, he reminded MPs, sounding surprisingly lucid. There was a tiering system for the vaccine, but it still couldn’t say which nursing homes and those over 80 would be first in line. Or how the vaccine would be administered. Little steps and all that.
But Johnson was only able to sustain the act for so long. After not appearing particularly enthusiastic about Starmer’s offer to work cross-party to counter anti-vaccine misinformation, he completely ignored the Labor leader’s question about the conduct of the Arcadia Group directors. So what if a few more people lose their jobs? Just add them to the total. Instead, he went on the attack, accusing Keir of failing to support the government in its new coronavirus measures the day before.
This was the real Boris. Major Sulk unable to release any resentment. He’d been through the charade of playing the statesman part and wanted to squeeze out the few third-rate jokes he’d put together that morning. Starmer refused to take the bait, instead observing that he had given his reasons for abstaining (it was not that the new measures were too punitive, but that they did not go far enough to offer financial support to threatened industries) and that when Johnson abstained as foreign secretary at Heathrow’s third runway, doing so under the pretext of a futile £ 20,000 round trip to Afghanistan.
That clearly hurt Johnson, but he didn’t give up. All thoughts about the vaccine were long erased and all I had in mind was scoring negligible points. “It would take it more seriously if it had voted with the government,” he continued, conveniently forgetting that if the Labor Party had not abstained, it would have lost the Tuesday night vote, and had already pardoned its own MPs who had voted. against him or they abstained, claiming that they had acted out of a strong sense of principle. The irony was lost on Boris but not on the rest of the house.
“He used to be Captain Hindsight,” Johnson continued. “Now it’s General Indecision.” If nothing else, it was an act of insubordination on the part of Major Sulk. The gag probably sounded better when he had practiced it in the shower. As it stood, it elicited only a few half laughs from the most loyal conservative backbenchers. Starmer’s instincts had been correct and Boris had misjudged the mood. This was a day for the country to unite, not for the leaders of the two main parties to fight like children. Somehow, without even realizing it, the prime minister had once again snatched humiliation from the jaws of defeat.
At the Downing Street press conference later in the afternoon, it sounded at first as if Johnson had doubts about his lack of warmongering nationalist rhetoric in the PMQs. In his opening remarks, he spoke about the “searchlights of science” pursuing the invisible enemy, “biological jiu-jitsu”, how Britain had pioneered the idea of vaccination and how the UK had led the way. being the first country to buy the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine.
But after Simon Stevens, executive director of NHS England, explained the logistical problems of distributing the vaccine to those who needed it most, and Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer, said how moved he was. for the truly global effort to develop a vaccine; he even pressed another one of his legendary train analogies, as well as noting that the vaccine was not a yogurt that could be carried in and out of a fridge (you should see some of the things in our fridge selling for dates) – Boris calmed down a bit.
So much so that when he was pressured twice to say that we basically owed our lives to Brexit and that we would never have been vaccinated if we had stayed in the EU, he refused both times. Although he was probably dying to say yes. At the end, he even sounded vaguely like a prime minister. It won’t last, so take advantage of it while you can.
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Join John Crace and Marina Hyde as they look back on a political year like no other. Thursday, December 10, 7 pm GMT, 8 pm CET, 2 pm EST. Book tickets here.
