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meIt was not the most orthodox of openings to the prime minister’s questions, with Conservative MP Sir David Amess announcing his new book, due out next week, and asking if Boris Johnson agreed with his central proposition that the The country had not voted for the Conservatives in the last election because it believed that the party would be good at dealing with the coronavirus, but because it wanted to “end Brexit.” Boris froze and surprisingly was quick to accept. Thus implicitly admitting that the government’s response to the pandemic had become increasingly disoriented.
None of which went unnoticed by Keir Starmer, who challenged Johnson on the outdated spreadsheets that led to 16,000 cases being left out of official Covid figures and another 48,000 people not being warned that they had been in contact with him. virus. Lives had been put at risk, the Labor leader said. It doesn’t hurt to point out the obvious sometimes.
Johnson looked depressed, even defeated, from the start. His insistence during his speech at the party conference the day before that he had “rediscovered his mojo” had sounded like hollow rhetoric at the time, and now it seemed more in the flesh. None of this is what Boris had wanted or planned. He had signed up for glory and applause. Not seeing the country going through its biggest health crisis in 100 years. Six months in and he’s almost out of ideas. He knows. Most importantly, your own doctors know it. Despite the fact that the whips have tried to make MPs sound more enthusiastic, nobody is fooled. The PMQs have become as unbearable to conservative ground troops as they are to Johnson.
Boris could barely raise his eyes as he muttered something about the missing test results being a technical problem that had already been solved. There is nothing to see here, it is time to move on. The Labor leader is now used to the prime minister dodging questions, but even he seemed taken aback by such a lackluster answer, completely devoid of personal responsibility. This was serious, he explained. Some of the data that had disappeared was from two and a half weeks earlier.
Once again, the prime minister was almost speechless. Starmer was making a big deal out of not much. All epidemiology pointed to the fact that all the lost cases and contacts came from areas where we already knew there was a high incidence of the virus. So if a few more people in the Northwest or Northeast died or were exposed to the disease, then there was no real harm. After all, they probably would have contracted the disease at some point anyway. What would have been concerning was if the disease was found to have spread to areas that were not yet localized. Let them eat cake.
What followed was not pleasant for the prime minister. The lost contacts were not an isolated case, Starmer said. They were just part of a series of ongoing problems with the test and trace system. Worse still, the government was like a rabbit in the headlights, unable to react to a changing situation. Local lockdowns might have seemed like a good idea about a month ago, and Labor had been the first to back the government in them, but now there was clear evidence that they weren’t working. Infections in 19 of the 20 areas had increased since the closures were introduced. So something needed to change.
What had to change, Boris said, was for Labor to continually interrupt from the sidelines and offer no support. Did the Labor Party support the “rule of six” or not? The sense of deja vu was muffled. Whenever he’s on the ropes and has no answers, the only way Boris knows how to answer is to go on the offensive and start asking questions himself. On another day, the speaker could have intervened and pointed out that the session was actually an opportunity to ask questions of the prime minister.
“Yes, we support the rule of six,” Starmer said. At least one party leader is able to give a direct answer to a direct question. The only reason Labor abstained from voting the day before was because they knew it was going to pass anyway. “Now if the prime minister listened to the questions, we could get along a little better.” What was really at stake here was that there was no consistency in any of the rules. Hillingdon’s own Johnson constituency had a higher incidence of the virus than some other areas that had been put under local lockdown.
And the Labor Party had been happy enough to accept the 10 p.m. curfew initially because it had assumed that the government must have some scientific evidence to back it up. Starmer’s mistake had been to treat the prime minister like a proper adult. So now he wanted to see the evidence before continuing to offer his support, as there was little sign that the curfew was having the desired effect. If Johnson had the data to show that things were even worse than they already are, then put them out. We were in the grip of a pandemic and the government must be prepared to change course when necessary. Everyone made mistakes in a fast-moving situation; the unforgivable thing was not acknowledging these mistakes and reacting to them.
Boris kept talking, but at this point no one was listening. Rather, there was a general sense of worthlessness on both sides of the house. Conservatives despair for a leader who weakens with every exit and doesn’t seem to really want the job anymore. Labor is also not very satisfied with Starmer, who thinks and beats Johnson. Partly because his victory already has a price, but also because the stakes are high. People are dying for the decisions that are made. The PMQs used to be part pantomime, with moments of great comedy. Now it is pure tragedy. Although the main actor is a clown who cannot even be trusted to tell the Commons his own name.
