Boris Johnson hit the wrong note on personal sacrifices during Covid

Keir Starmer is usually the robotic one, while Boris Johnson, however clownish, tends to come across as the more empathetic humanoid. Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions saw the roles reversed. After initially asking about the departure of Matt Hancock as health secretary, Starmer asked a question about the terrible story of Ollie Bibby, whose family were not allowed to visit him because of Covid rules as he was dying of leukaemia.

This turned the abstract criticism of Hancock for breaking the rules into a human story. Until that point, the prime minister had deflected the charge that he hadn’t got rid of his health secretary quickly enough by saying, in effect, “He’s gone now, what more do you want?” He had Sajid Javid, the replacement, sitting next him as a visual aid to make the point.

But now he faced an emotional test. The robot in the prime minister detected the threat and flicked the tone switch: “We all share the grief and pain of Ollie and his family and millions of people up and down the country who endured the privations that this country has been through.” Unfortunately, the switch didn’t stay on “mournfully serious” for long enough. In the next breath Johnson reverted to the question of why he hadn’t sacked Hancock immediately, and said that, “instead of focusing on stuff going on within the Westminster bubble, we are focusing on rolling out vaccines”.

Suddenly the automaton prime minister had lost his way, and it was the bloodless lawyer opposite him who seemed to feel the people’s pain. Starmer showed he can think on his feet, and demanded that the prime minister withdraw the “Westminster bubble” phrase. The robot opposite did no such thing, going into “never apologise, never explain” mode. Instead of explaining that he was talking about Labour’s obsession with the timing of Hancock’s departure and repeating his condolences to the Bibby family, Johnson ploughed on and changed the subject to his familiar partisan attack on Starmer for being a Remainer who wouldn’t have been able to deploy the vaccines as quickly as the government had done.

Starmer drove his point home, quoting Ollie Bibby’s mother, who said that the family had tried to follow the rules, and contrasted “the British people doing everything asked of them” with the behaviour of Dominic Cummings “driving to Barnard Castle” and Hancock breaking Covid rules. So when the normally wooden Labour leader said, “there is one rule for them, and another rule for everybody else,” it carried some emotional punch.

The prime minister didn’t seem to realise that the question had changed and carried on answering the first question he had been asked. It was all very well Starmer criticising him for not sacking Hancock quickly enough, Johnson said, but the leader of the opposition had spent three days trying and failing to sack his own deputy.

The prime minister seemed to think that this party-political point-scoring was so important that he came back to it in his final answer. He listed all the titles that had been heaped on Angela Rayner, including shadow secretary of state for the future of work, tried to make a feeble point about the employment figures, and concluded: “We create jobs; he creates non-jobs.”

It would have been embarrassing at the end of a routine exchange of partisan sound bites, but after Ollie’s case it struck a clangingly discordant note. By now the question was whether the prime minister understood the anger of people who felt they had made sacrifices to follow the rules for the sake of the common good, only to see ministers and government advisers behaving as if the rules didn’t apply to them.

To which the answer from the prime ministerial robot appeared to be: No, he didn’t understand it at all. No wonder Johnson left the chamber hurriedly at the end of the session looking as if he realised that there had been a malfunction in the circuits.