Keir Starmer had a weak PMQs

Keir Starmer had an unusually weak Prime Minister’s Questions today. He chose to attack Rishi Sunak on the nurses’ strikes, insisting that the Prime Minister could avert the walkouts, which begin tomorrow, by having a meeting with the nurses. ‘All the Prime Minister needs to do to stop that is to open the door and discuss pay with them,’ he claimed. He also described the first nationwide strike by nursing staff as a ‘badge of shame’ for the government. 

Not only was Sunak able to deflect this by pointing out that Labour wasn’t prepared to give in to the Royal College of Nursing’s demand for a 19 per cent pay rise, but he also accused Starmer of being weak himself, when that political flaw was precisely what the Labour leader was building up to for the PM. Sunak said: ‘The honourable gentleman says to get round the table, but we all know what that is, Mr Speaker, that is just simply a political formula for avoiding taking a position on this issue. If he thinks the strikes are wrong, he should say so, if he thinks it’s right that pay demands of 19 per cent are met then he should say so. What’s weak Mr Speaker is he’s not strong enough to stand up to the unions.’

This wasn’t strictly fair, given Labour has already said it wouldn’t give pay rises at that level. But what Starmer wasn’t able to do in those first questions or in subsequent ones was fully prosecute a case (ironic, that) against the Tories’ handling of the NHS more widely. He tried in his third question, citing the huge vacancies and short staffing in the health service, but it would have been more effective to lead on that and then use the government’s failure to avert the strikes, which will make things worse, as just another example of Sunak’s disregard for the health service. Instead, Sunak looked comfortable throughout, which he shouldn’t do given those vacancies and given the struggles that hospitals are facing aside from the industrial action. 

SNP leader Stephen Flynn had a helpful point to add to this, which was that the Scottish government had managed to get into a position where the RCN has paused its strike threat for NHS Scotland while more pay talks take place. Starmer couldn’t have brought this up, as he would have been accused of cosying up to the nationalists when he’s only just managed to stop questions about some kind of pact with the SNP. But it showed that there were stronger lines of questioning that could have highlighted a specific Conservative failure here. Starmer didn’t manage to identify ones that worked for him today.