WESTMINSTER (Labour Buzz) - The kids are going back to school and so are the MPs. Parliament is back and so is PMQs and with Johnson reluctantly settling back into the office, Keir Starmer had plenty of ammunition and he made great use of it.
Exam fiasco
It may be a week or so old, but Starmer kicked off with the ‘exam fiasco’. Quoting the PM who described the grades at the time as ‘robust and dependable’ he demanded to know when the Prime Minister found out about the problems with the algorithm.
Johnson responded by wishing Starmer a happy birthday before hailing his party’s never-ending ability to make last-minute U-turns.
“As a result of what we learned about the results... we did institute a change, we did act and students now have grades.”
He then bizarrely challenged Starmer to join him in congratulating students on achieving the very grades that his Government tried to take away.
Starmer pressed him again on the question which Johnson had avoided, “He either didn’t know when he should have or he did know and did nothing.”
Johnson’s only defence was attack, claiming Starmer had spent the summer undermining confidence in the system and claimed teachers were now ‘proving the doubters wrong’ by returning to schools in England.
Tin-eared PM
Starmer is showing that he can be every bit as aggressive as Johnson. He said, Johnson was ‘tin-eared' and making it up as he goes along.
He was ‘fooling nobody', and even his own MPs were turning against him. He quoted vice-Chair of the 1922 Committee who claimed the Government said: “one thing on Monday, changes its mind on Tuesday and we’re presented with something else on Wednesday.”
Another MP described it as ‘mess after mess’ and it’s a ‘question of competence.’
Faced with condemnation from his own MPs, Johnson disintegrated completely. He stitched into tangent after tangent, moving to Brexit before incredibly accusing Starmer of supporting the IRA. He veered so completely from the plot that the Speaker felt compelled to intervene.
“We do need to answer the question which is being asked.”
Johnson ignored it and pressed on with reverting to his tried and trusted line of calling Starmer Captain Hindsight.
It was tired when he first used it and it was utterly moribund now. Starmer swatted it back easily by pointing out that Johnson was ‘Governing in hindsight’ as he stumbled from crisis to crisis.
He also challenged Johnson to take back his comments about the IRA, to which the Speaker agreed. He had prosecuted terrorists for five years working with the Police in Northern Ireland. When Johnson had worked as a Prosecutor, he said, perhaps he could ‘lecture him’.
Furlough scheme
Starmer then moved on to the next looming crisis. Johnson’s strategy, he said, had always been the same ‘pretend the problem doesn’t exist make the wrong decision and blame someone else.” On the day after companies found themselves having to pay to increase their contributions, he again urged him to act now and ‘finally get this decision right’.
Needless to say, Johnson didn’t. The country has already spent £40bn on the furlough scheme, he said. Instead, he highlighted a Kick Start Scheme which is designed to get people back work rather than being kept in suspended animation.
Wasted summer
Starmer’s next question hammered the final nail into the coffin. He decried a wasted summer in which the Prime Minister had lurched from ‘crisis to crisis’, ‘U-turn to U-turn’. When the Government has notched up 12 U-turns and rising the only conclusion is ‘serial incompetence’.
He challenged the Prime Minister to take responsibility and finally ‘get a grip’. It was a powerful argument, all the more so because he can draw on highly public complaints from his own party. At a time when the PM seen a 20 point lead in the polls dwindle away to nothing you can feel the unrest stirring behind him and Johnson looked like a man who was already feeling the heat behind him.
Bereaved families
Finally, Starmer closed by bringing the conversation back to them before the recess when he’d asked Johnson to meet with the COVID 19 Bereaved Families for Justice Group as he had. Johnson had appeared to promise on Sky News that he would ‘of course’ meet the bereaved before sending them a letter claiming that meeting them was now ‘regrettably not possible.’
He had said one thing to the camera and another to the families. He urged him to ‘do the right thing and change that decision’.
Johnson claimed that he will meet them but insisted he will only meet them once the litigation was over.
It was a woeful end to what was possibly Johnson’s most woeful performance yet, which is saying something. Not once did he answer a question because there simply weren’t any answers to have. Instead, he resorted to his favourite ‘dead cat’ tactic when losing an argument of trying to change the topic of the conversation.
It might have worked for him in the past but it didn’t now. With even his own MPs openly criticising his performance, the sense prevails of a Government for whom the wheels have well and truly come off.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)