UK Covid live: Keir Starmer says England heading for ‘summer of chaos and confusion’

For an opposition leader, the easiest way to score a hit at PMQs is to scan the newspapers in the morning, identify an issue on which the government is taking a pasting (preferably from papers from the left and from the right, and preferably on an issue on which the government has no straightforward answer), and then hammer away. This was essentially what Sir Keir Starmer did today and it worked.

The key question was the one Starmer asked about the prospect of millions of people being pinged over the summer. How many people would be affected? Boris Johnson would not answer, prompted Starmer to retort: “The question was simply how many people are going to be asked to self-isolate if there are 100,000 infections a day and he won’t answer it.”

But Starmer started with another question, one which journalists have been asking all week. How many deaths, hospitalisations and cases of long Covid are expected following the announcement that almost all restrictions in England will be lifted from 19 July? Again, Johnson refused to give an answer.

Overall Starmer’s approach worked well. His questions were fair and reasonable, and Johnson’s answers were evasive. But it was a qualified win because, as Johnson pointed out accurately, there was an inherent contradiction in Starmer’s line of attack. Johnson told the Labour leader:

What we will be doing is moving away from self-isolation towards testing over the course of the next few weeks, and that is the prudent approach. He can’t have it both ways. He says it’s reckless to open up and yet he attacks self-isolation which is one of the key protections that this country has.

It is common to argue that, because it is prime minister’s questions, it is not for the opposition leader to have to say what he would do, and this was a point that Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, made forcefully today. And generally, when the PM resorts to the ‘What would you do?’ backstop, it sounds like a distraction. But most members of the public are less concerned about Commons standing orders than Hoyle, and today it felt as this was an appropriate issue for Johnson to raise.

On lockdown easing generally, Starmer had a perfectly good answer. He said:

We should open up in a controlled way, keeping baseline protections such as masks on public transport, improving ventilation, making sure the track and trace system remains effective, and ensuring proper payments for self-isolation.

But as for what Labour would do about the problems faced by the millions of people likely to be pinged as case numbers go up in the summer, Starmer does not seem to have an answer at all. Johnson would have done better today if he had challenged Starmer more forcefully on this point. And a bit more candour about what the modelling says about hospitalisations and deaths would have helped too, particularly since these figures will come out relatively soon.

One final piece of advice for Johnson; it’s time to bin his PMQs peroration. Today he concluded his final response to Starmer with: “We vaccinate, they vacillate. We inoculate, while they’re invertebrate.” Johnson seemed particularly proud of the final half-rhyme, a new edition to this silly spiel. But it’s a terrible slogan because it involves arcane language and it has clearly been formulated not to make a point but to show off Johnson’s verbal dexterity. One suspects that if someone like Lynton Crosby were in No 10 vetting the PM’s scripts – someone forceful, with the authority to stop him talking nonsense – this joke would have been banned weeks ago.