By calling Boris Johnson a liar, Keir Starmer is letting him off too lightly

Perhaps Keir Starmer is playing a complicated game by attacking our law-breaking prime minister so feebly that he remains in office, because Labour would rather face Boris Johnson at the next election than any other Conservative.

That doesn’t seem likely, so the more likely explanation is that the Labour leader is a victim of his inexperience. I think Starmer’s response to the prime minister receiving a penalty notice for breaking lockdown laws was misjudged. He said: “Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have broken the law and repeatedly lied to the British public. They must both resign.”

Of those three points, only the first is effective in my view, and it was undermined by the next two. Starmer should have criticised Johnson for breaking the law, and repeated that point in all its dimensions: a law designed to save lives; a law devised by Johnson’s own government; the law is the law is the law.

Starmer no doubt thought that adding the charge that Johnson and Sunak had lied would add to the case against the government. Paradoxically, it lessened it. And by calling for them to resign, when there is no prospect of Johnson, at least, doing so, he adopted the air of a man shouting at clouds.

Starmer speaks to Tony Blair occasionally, but I don’t know if he listens. He should study and learn from the only Labour leader to have won a sustainable parliamentary majority for 56 years. And he should start with this passage in Blair’s memoir, where the former prime minister sets out how he got the better of the five Conservative leaders he faced: “I defined Major as weak; Hague as better at jokes than judgement; Howard as an opportunist; Cameron as a flip-flop,” he writes. (He didn’t bother with Iain Duncan Smith because “the Tories did my work for me”.)

He continues: “Expressed like that, these attacks seem flat, rather mundane almost, and not exactly inspiring – but that’s their appeal. Any one of those charges, if it comes to be believed, is actually fatal. Yes, it’s not like calling your opponent a liar, or a fraud, or a villain or a hypocrite, but the middle-ground floating voter kind of shrugs their shoulders at those claims. They don’t chime. They’re too over the top, too heavy, and they represent an insult, not an argument. Whereas the lesser charge, because it’s more accurate and precisely because it’s more low-key, can stick.”

Instead, Starmer calls Johnson a liar, and goes on about that part of the ministerial code that says ministers must not mislead parliament – but the code says “knowingly”, which is the difficult bit. It is hard to show that Johnson knew he was misleading the Commons when he said the rules were followed at all times; but more importantly, Starmer has already lost the attention of persuadable voters by that point.

As Blair said, calling someone a liar is an insult, because you are impugning their motive. If you say someone has inadvertently misled the house, you are more likely to engage the “middle-ground floating voter”. The rules of parliamentary decorum and those of political persuasion coincide in pleasing symmetry.

As Karim Palant, former head of policy for Ed Balls when the latter was shadow chancellor, says: “It’s a reminder that being morally indignant – whether justified or not – is not an electoral strategy.”

In my view, Starmer should pay more attention to that part of the ministerial code that says ministers have an “overarching duty” to “comply with the law”, and tie that in with two more believable charges: incompetence, and being out of touch.

That is why “one rule for them and a different rule for the rest” is a powerful line – as opposed to “hypocrisy” (and Starmer has accused Johnson of both the “breathtaking” and the “rank” variety). Johnson didn’t really believe in the lockdown laws he imposed on everyone else, and certainly didn’t think they applied to him. As a result, he never even knew what the law allowed and didn’t allow.

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Chris Curtis, head of political polling at Opinium, says: “I think Labour’s job is to explain why Johnson’s weaknesses actually matter to people’s lives. ‘He is a liar’ doesn’t quite cut it; you have to say why him being a liar actually matters.”

Those for whom calling Johnson a liar is an article of faith protest that 75 per cent of the British public think he lied about “whether or not he broke lockdown rules”, and insist that it is effective for Starmer to express what most people think. But I don’t think that is how public opinion works. People think they are entitled to shout abuse and insults at politicians, but they find it unsettling if leaders join in.

Equally, 60 per cent of people say that Johnson and Sunak should resign, so Starmer seems to be in tune with the public on that, too. Except that the default position of any opinion poll respondent is that any politician should resign. Yesterday’s furore may have reminded some voters that they feel strongly about double standards on coronavirus regulations, and so Johnson’s ratings may dip again, but the last time they did, they soon drifted back up again. Last month, Johnson was generally a little ahead of Starmer when polls asked who would make the better prime minister.

Starmer needs to build the case against his opponent in plain, factual language. Boris Johnson is incompetent; he’s out of touch; he broke the law; he asked the country to make sacrifices he wasn’t prepared to make himself. That is all the Labour leader needs to say. He should leave the cries of “Liar!” and “Resign!” to the wilder shores of social media.