posted on 13/5/2020 13:47PMQs - xdb

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Sir Keir Starmer was widely expected to outperform Boris Johnson at PMQs, and in their first encounter last week he duly managed to do so with aplomb. On their second outing you would have expected No 10 to have given some thought to how to mount a more effective response. But there was not much evidence of this, and Johnson was duly skittled.

One problem for Johnson was that some of the usual tactics just don’t work at Zoom PMQs. A outright untruth can win you temporary reprieve in the House of Commons if 300 MPs are cheering you on and it is going to take people a while to work out that you’re mistaken or lying, but Johnson does not have the wall of sound protection he used to enjoy, and denying the existence of a document that Labour were able to circulate within seconds (see 12.47pm) was just an elementary error. Starmer is not infallible, and there are ways of beating him in an argument. But suggesting that Starmer (the archetypal “swot”, as the PM would put it) is wrong on a point of fact - how naive can you get?

Having exhausted denial as a tactic, Johnson (in exchanges two and three) resorted to ignoring the question. But this, again, is a less reliable tactic in a largely silent House of Commons, and Johnson’s failure to be able to address the point raised by the Ambrose Evans-Pritchard column in the Telegraph, or to be able to give a sensible explanation of the excess death figure, left him looking unimpressive. In the final three answers Johnson was on slightly less shaky ground. There is an argument for not using the global death comparisons chart (although one that’s harder to make if you’ve only just abandoned it now), he did at last acknowledge the childcare problem, and he promised to publish Sage advice. But his very partial recovery was too late. By then the damage was done.

Again, none of this was particularly surprising. But Starmer has only appeared at four PMQs, and only two against Johnson, and already he has established mastership of the arena. That’s a notable achievement so early in his time as opposition leader.