Keir Starmer got his first chance to take on Boris Johnson at PMQs today. There was no moment that will lead the evening news, but the new Labour leader did make Boris Johnson uncomfortable at times. When Starmer asked why the UK had moved away from contract tracing and testing in mid-March, Boris Johnson gave a long, rather rambling answer. But it is increasingly clear that this happened because the UK simply did not have the capacity to do this at the required level. Given that this is the case, the government would do well to be explicit about it
In a further sign of how lacking the UK’s testing capacity was before this crisis hit, Boris Johnson announced a new target of 200,000 tests a day by the end of the month. He also said that the UK’s contract tracing system can deal with ‘hundreds of thousands of people’.
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