Martial law was declared yesterday. And today Boris was expected to arrive at PMQs dressed in jackboots, an olive tunic and wraparound shades, with a Glock 18 machine-pistol tucked into his holster. Instead he wore a plain business suit. Perhaps he wanted to give his people a friendlier impression of their overlord.
He seemed unusually jovial and upbeat at the despatch box, despite all the barmy rumours swirling around the internet. He was as bouncy as a spaniel on a trampoline. And he was helped by his secret weapon, Sir Keir Starmer’s over-active legal brain. The Labour leader had spotted a discrepancy between two prime ministerial utterances.
‘Three months ago today,’ he said, in his menacingly toneless voice, ‘the prime minister said test and trace can be a real game-changer…Yesterday he said test and trace has very little or nothing to do with the spread of the disease. Both cannot be right. Which is it?’
Boris swatted this aside and declared that the government was following ‘in granular detail’ the advance of the pandemic. Sir Keir expressed bafflement and repeated his question. Boris expressed bafflement at Sir Keir’s bafflement and repeated his answer.
The quibble came down to Sir Keir’s deliberate misinterpretation. Test and trace can help identify infection-clusters. That’s what Boris meant three months ago. The virus itself is an air-borne disease whose nature cannot be altered by test and trace. That’s what he meant yesterday. The point is, who cares? Only Sir Keir, a born swot, could believe that a barrage of obsessive nit-pickery might hurt Boris or the government. He often gets excited by stuff that bores the voters. And he seems unaware that this is a weakness.
Sir Keir widened his complaint to include Dido Harding. ‘Is the explanation from the PM that we haven’t got enough capacity because nobody could have expected the rise in demand? That’s the Dido Harding defence,’ he said.
Instead of addressing this, Boris challenged Sir Keir’s motives in raising Ms Harding at all. He described it as an ‘unseemly and unjustified attack’. Very chivalrous. And very curious too. Dido Harding has become the government’s Meghan Markle. Any criticism of her is a form of blasphemy. This defensive posturing from Boris suggests a source of weakness which Sir Keir would do well to probe. But he probably won’t. He doesn’t read human beings very well. He’s better with briefs.
Some Tories are starting to despair of Boris’s long-term strategy in government. But he offered a glimpse of his battle-plan today. He absorbed Sir Keir’s six questions without stirring himself greatly. Only at the end did he step out of his corner and fight with concentrated savagery. Labour had handed him a weapon which he was not about to squander. Their education spokeswoman, Kate Green, has advised her party not to ‘let a good crisis go to waste.’
‘The cat’s out of the bag,’ cried Boris. And he berated Labour for ‘seeking to create political opportunity out of the difficulties and dangers this country is going through.’
There’s his strategy, in miniature. He waited till the final moments before he came out swinging like a champ. And elections can be won like that as well, with bursts of focused effort in the last few weeks or even days. Our present tribulations will be all but forgotten by 2024. That’s his gamble.
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