Thanks to Keir Starmer, Boris Johnson made a crass message about Covid and the over-80s sound reasonable

The prime minister is not easily embarrassed, but even he was bound to have an awkward time explaining why he had sent a message to Dominic Cummings, his chief adviser, last year, saying: “Get Covid and live longer.”

He did indeed have an uncomfortable time at the last session of Prime Minister’s Questions before the summer recess, but it could have been worse for him. His instinct for political survival kicked in, as he threw himself on the mercy of the families of those who have died: “Nothing I can say from this despatch box – or this virtual despatch box – and nothing I can do can make up for the loss and the suffering that people have endured throughout this pandemic.”

He said there would be a public inquiry and that back in “those very very difficult and dark times” last October he had had to make some “incredibly tough balancing decisions”. He tacitly admitted that Cummings’s account of his WhatsApp message was right. In it, Boris Johnson pointed out that the median age of death from Covid was higher than median life expectancy, making the flippant suggestion that catching Covid could extend people’s lives. I assume he knew that this was nonsense, and that on average people dying of Covid could have expected another 10 years of life, but the implication, that old people were dispensable, was unmistakable.

“What has changed since I remember we were thinking in those ways is that we have rolled out vaccines faster than any other country in Europe,” said the prime minister, at the same time admitting that he had said something tasteless in private and that he had changed his mind since then.

It could have been a disastrous moment if he had been in the chamber of the Commons, and if Keir Starmer had been briefer and more brutal in his cross-examination. But taking part by video from his isolation in Chequers, the prime minister’s country home, meant that he was remote in both senses of the word. He was buffered from the emotional power of having to tell MPs and the nation that he had more than once expressed the sentiment, “Let the bodies pile high.”

Starmer did not make him pay for it, asking long and rambling questions that seemed to feel the need to touch on everything that had been in the headlines over the previous week. He allowed himself to be distracted into answering a question the prime minister threw back at him – except that he avoided it just as adeptly as Johnson avoided his. Starmer accused Johnson of being a super-spreader of confusion on vaccine passports for nightclubs, which was a good line except that, as Johnson pointed out, Starmer didn’t say whether he was for or against them. Starmer just rephrased the question: “The prime minister keeps asking me if I’ll support his chaos. No.”

In the end, this 60th anniversary edition of PMQs, as Johnson called it – the first session of the “experiment” pitted Hugh Gaitskell against Harold Macmillan on 18 July 1961 – degenerated into an exchange of three-word slogans. Starmer offered Johnson “On the Hoof” and “Get a Grip”. Johnson responded with “Get a Jab” and turning “Jabs, Jabs, Jabs” into “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs”.

At the end of it, it is surprising to be able to relate that the prime minister was able to turn having said something appallingly crass to Dominic Cummings nine months ago into an almost reasonable defence of making those “incredibly tough” decisions. Johnson said: “You have to balance the catastrophe of the disease against the suffering that is caused by lockdowns: the impacts on mental health and the loss of life-chances for young people.”

Starmer couldn’t decide whether to prosecute the public inquiry into decisions taken then, or to criticise the government over its current confusions, and ended up doing neither well, letting the prime minister escape once again.