Roll up, roll up for the latest session of Prime Minister’s Non Sequiturs

Keir Starmer’s theme for Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) was the government’s imminent and inevitable U-turn on a windfall tax on oil and gas companies to pay for help with energy bills. The Labour leader started by asking if the prime minister was for or against it. Boris Johnson responded by saying: “The right honourable gentleman struggled to define what a woman was.”

This is taking deflection to a new and higher level. It is disgraceful, naturally, but it also has to be recognised as ruthless and effective. For all the apparent chaos of the prime minister’s non sequiturs, he actually shows a remarkable message discipline, crowbarring his emotion-based talking points into a forum notionally designed to hold him to account. He did it with the line about Starmer using his time as Director of Public Prosecutions “failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, as far as I can see”, at PMQs in February.

This latest device was just as cynical. The only connection with Starmer’s question was “not knowing if you are for or against something”. Johnson’s reply in effect admitted he didn’t know what he thought about a central issue of economic policy, but that didn’t matter because Starmer didn’t know what he thought about something completely different.

The prime minister then pretended to answer the actual question but diverted into a completely different kind of non sequitur. “This government is not in principle in favour of higher taxation,” he said. The unsaid part of that sentence was that it is in practice in favour of the highest level of taxation in peacetime history.

Only then did we get to the substance of Johnson’s defence, which was that Labour would put up taxes even more. “Nothing could be more transparent than Labour’s lust to raise taxes,” he said in answer to a later question.

Again, the real debate was being conducted at the level of what was not said. When he and Rishi Sunak finally bow to the inevitable and introduce a windfall tax, Johnson did not actually say, they will do it reluctantly, because they really don’t want to do it – and they will probably combine it with a tax cut for the low paid.

It is true that what Starmer did not say is that Labour does, in general, believe in higher taxes to pay for better public services, even though his public argument about the windfall tax is that it is a “one-off”, as a result of “unexpected” profits made by the oil and gas companies. Indeed, the economic case for a windfall tax is so respectable that Starmer was able to read out a long list of people who support it, including William Hague, the former leader of the Conservative Party, and Lord Browne, the former boss of BP.

Against a normal political opponent, the Labour leader would have had fun with the contradictory statements made about a windfall tax by government ministers up to and including Johnson himself. And he would have built a strong political argument about the cost of the prime minister’s indecision falling not just on the poorest but on those aspirant voters on middle incomes, who have to continue to suffer while the government fends off what is going to happen later rather than sooner.

Starmer even had a case study of someone on dialysis who had to go without food to pay the energy bills. So he had his video clips for the news and social media, but he was denied his moment in the Commons by Johnson’s wilful refusal to engage with the argument. Even the dialysis patient was turned into a soundbite about how Labour had “voted against the vital investment in the NHS”.

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By now Johnson knew that Starmer had used up all his questions, so he was off the leash, free to pursue ever more disconnected non sequiturs. Before we knew it, he was taking credit for having been the mayor of London when Crossrail was started (it was of course Ken Livingstone who started it) and now for being the prime minister overseeing its opening next week. What is more, Johnson said, “there has never been a Labour government that left office with unemployment lower than when they began”.

It is such a successful distraction technique that I found myself involuntarily wondering if this was because there have been so few Labour governments (six).

Starmer had made his point. A U-turn is coming. Labour was right about a windfall tax and the government will refuse to admit it until it says the situation has changed and it introduces something that is definitely not called a windfall tax. Most people know it, and Johnson ought to be embarrassed, but he is unembarrassable.

Asking who “won” those exchanges is about as meaningful as asking who won a game of rugby against tennis.