Boris Johnson asked good questions about unlocking the country – if only he could answer them himself

Sky News had a caption under its live broadcast: “Boris Johnson is answering MPs’ questions.” This was a mis-description. It should have said: “Keir Starmer is answering the PM’s questions.”

Boris Johnson was told off by Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker: “Maybe I could help a little to remind us it’s Prime Minister’s Questions; if we want Opposition Questions, we will need to change the standing orders.”

The prime minister was unabashed, responding to each of Starmer’s questions by asking one of his own. The same question each time. “What people would like to hear from the party opposite,” he said, “is whether or not they support the progress that this country is intending to make on 19 July.” Johnson pointed out that Starmer had said it was “reckless” to go ahead: “Does that mean he’s opposing it?”

Starmer answered the question each time, as if he was unaware of the game Johnson was playing. “We should open up in a controlled way,” the Labour leader said. “Keeping face masks and protections, such as masks on public transport, improving ventilation, making sure the track and trace system remains effective, and ensuring proper payments for self-isolation.”

A perfectly sensible answer, but the answers were supposed to come from the other side of the despatch boxes. Hoyle repeated his comment: “Once again, it’s Prime Minister’s Questions and the prime minister answers questions.”

Johnson ignored him, telling Starmer: “This is not like the law, where you can attack from lots of different positions at once; to oppose, you must have a credible and clear alternative. Is he in favour of us moving forward, yes or no? It’s completely impossible to tell.”

Starmer rose to the bait again: “If he’d stopped mumbling and listened, he’d have heard the answer the first time.” He repeated Labour’s policies and then asked more questions. He quoted newspaper estimates of millions of people having to isolate and asked what the government’s figure was. He asked what the prime minister was going to do to prevent people deleting the NHS app so that they wouldn’t be required to isolate.

Johnson hardly bothered to pretend to answer and returned to his question: “It’s all about whether the difference is between making face masks mandatory or advisory on the Tube: if that is the only difference between us, then that is good news. But I’d like to hear it clarified.”

In the simple theatre of the Commons, Johnson “won” the exchanges. There is indeed little difference between the government and the opposition, although the public supports Labour’s policy of keeping compulsory face coverings on public transport and in shops – and the issue of disincentives to isolation is a serious one.

Starmer is a poor actor, which is why Johnson’s barbs about the law cut through. Although the Labour leader did manage the low blow of calling the delta variant the “Johnson variant”.

But thank goodness Starmer refuses to engage with the greasepaint and dramatics. Otherwise we might have heard that tedious staple of Ed Miliband’s time as leader of the opposition: “If the prime minister wants to swap places, I would be very happy to do so.”

Instead, Starmer left the cringeworthy point-scoring to the prime minister. Johnson turned his nominal answer to Starmer’s sixth question into a compilation of his greatest hits: “If we’d followed his advice, we would still be in the European Medicines Agency and we would never have rolled out the vaccines as fast. If we had followed his advice, we would never have got schools open, with all the damage to kids’ education. If we’d listened to him, we would not now be proceeding cautiously, pragmatically, sensibly to reopen our society and our economy and give people back the chance to enjoy the freedoms they love.”

And he ended it with a new variant – a variant of deep concern, this one – of his “we vaccinate, they vacillate” sound bite: “We inoculate while they’re invertebrate.”

It was a virtuoso but embarrassing show. Boris Johnson asked one significant question about masks; if only there had been a prime minister there to answer it.