Boris Johnson had a very difficult backdrop to today’s Prime Minister’s Questions, having marked 100,000 deaths in the coronavirus pandemic last night. But, strangely, he didn’t have a particularly difficult session in the Commons.
Sir Keir Starmer did, as you might expect, lead on the death toll, asking the Prime Minister repeatedly why he thought the UK had such a high death rate, and why he wouldn’t learn the lessons from the pandemic now so that the government didn’t repeat its mistakes. Johnson was able to deal with this reasonably easily, arguing that while he did think there would be a time to learn the lessons of what happened, that time wasn’t now. The public, he said, want politicians to come together and focus on rolling out the vaccine and protecting the health service. Of course, this is merely a holding line — and the Prime Minister is notably reluctant to say when he thinks the right time for proper reflection and a public inquiry will be. But it stopped him from ending up on the ropes over the UK’s terribly high death toll.
One of Starmer’s criticisms of the Prime Minister was that he is too slow to make decisions
He repeatedly talked about the success of the vaccination programme, telling MPs that 6.9 million people had received their first dose, and demanding that Starmer apologises for querying the £670,000 PR spend by the Vaccines Taskforce chief Kate Bingham. Johnson explained that this money was for testing public perceptions on getting vaccinated, and said he couldn’t think of a better way of spending it.
One of Starmer’s criticisms of the Prime Minister today was that he is too slow to make decisions. But Labour has dragged its feet too, and the leader of the opposition showed that again with his demands at this session. He asked why the government wasn’t announcing that new arrivals to the UK must be tested and quarantined from today, to which Johnson retorted that ‘it’s been the habit of the opposition first to support one approach, then to attack it and twist and turn’.
Johnson has a fair point here: the decision on borders was taken yesterday, with an announcement taking place earlier this afternoon, around an hour after the conclusion of PMQs. So it seems rather late in the day for the Labour leader to be talking about it as though it’s a new idea. Starmer also demanded that ministers use the February half term to vaccinate teachers, which allowed Johnson to ridicule his position on whether schools are safe.
Labour’s questions about why the death toll is so high and whether there are lessons to be learnt now, while the pandemic is still raging, is an important one. But the strangely muted, oddly slow way the opposition is responding to developments makes these questions considerably less difficult for Johnson to answer. And that contributes to the chance of the government making more mistakes in the coming months.
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