PMQs: Johnson’s inappropriate jab joke

Sir Keir Starmer had a powerful line of attack at today’s Prime Minister’s Questions. He led on the government’s own review of the treatment of rape and sexual violence, which recommended sweeping reforms to the way cases are handled so that the current low rate of charges and convictions can be reversed. Prosecutions have fallen by nearly 60 per cent in four years — to just 2,102 — while convictions have also experienced a similar decline. Today, Starmer pointed out that 98.4 per cent of reported rapes don’t lead to a charge. He repeatedly pressed Johnson on what the government was actually doing beyond apologising for the current situation.

Johnson was able to point out that he was the one who commissioned the review and spoke with empathy about the impact of the current system on victims. But it was not until the fifth question that he apologised for what complainants had experienced — and only when Starmer pointed out that the Justice Secretary had given his own apology. The Labour leader also repeatedly upbraided Johnson for talking merely about sentencing for offenders when the problems arose earlier in the justice pipeline, both at charge and conviction stage.

There were two reasons why the Prime Minister kept talking about sentencing. One was that it allowed him to suggest that the government was taking action against offenders. The other was that he could then attack Starmer for whipping his party to vote against longer sentences for sexual and violent offenders in the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Johnson was obviously overjoyed when Labour ended up being bounced into voting against the second reading of this wide-ranging piece of legislation because of concerns about its plans to clamp down on protests. Privately, Labour frontbenchers have been unhappy about the way in which this decision has allowed the Tories to paint their party as being soft on home affairs more widely. That the PM was able to use it once again shows the risks for Starmer of being swept up in events. After all, Johnson leads the party that has been in power throughout the period that prosecutions and conviction have been dropping.

But Johnson also misfired in his final answer. He had come up with a series of catchy criticisms for Starmer which developed his ‘he vacillates, we vaccinate’ line. This time, he told the Commons: ‘they jabber, we jab’. The problem is that it didn’t really work in the context of a series of questions about rape. It undid the Prime Minister’s attempts to show care and empathy in his earlier answers. It isn’t unusual for PMs to get worked up during these sessions and say something they regret — David Cameron would famously turn a funny shade of pink before telling women to ‘calm down, dear’ or calling Ed Balls a ‘muttering idiot’. But these were pre-prepared lines. It would have been better for Johnson to dump them.