PMQs: Starmer poses the question that ministers are asking in private

Today’s PMQs was more political than I had expected. But that is a good thing, challenge and accountability are the great strengths of the Westminster system and lead to better government.

Keir Starmer is never going to be an exciting parliamentary performer, but his questions were detailed and he followed up on Dominic Raab’s answer. He will be far more effective at scrutinising the government than Jeremy Corbyn was.

Starmer went on testing and the question of why half of the current capacity isn’t being used, a question that lots of people in government are asking too. Raab in his answers tried to make the issue not about the number of tests being carried out, but the overall testing capacity. But it is clear that if 100,000 tests aren’t being carried out every day by the end of the month – something that looks highly unlikely – the government is going to have its competence called into question.

We saw from Raab how the government is going to defend itself over its handling of this pandemic overall. When Starmer criticised it for being slow into lockdown, Raab asked Starmer if he really thought that he knew better than the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser. 

The government’s defence, and it is a reasonable one, is that it followed the scientific advice at all times. (Though, as I say in The Spectator, out tomorrow, there is now a recognition in private that they didn’t interrogate the science enough in the early months of this year). Raab also highlighted that the government has, in a very short space of time, created enough spare capacity to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed. Indeed, this is its great achievement in this crisis. Six weeks ago, few of us would have thought that you could have 800 deaths a day at the peak without hospitals being simply overrun.

One other noteworthy aspect of this PMQs was Peter Bone’s attack on the banks. It was more evidence that they are becoming a bogeyman for the old Tory right too. As the relationship between banks and businesses, particularly small ones, becomes more strained so will the relationship between banks and the Tory party.