Keir Starmer has stumbled and let Boris Johnson off the coronavirus hook

Keir Starmer could have gone all out for lockdown, and he would have had public opinion behind him, but he held back until the last moment yesterday. He ended up calling for schools to close after the prime minister had already signalled that tougher measures were imminent, and only a few hours before school closures were actually announced.  

There were good reasons for this: it has been common ground since the summer that schools should be the last thing to close down. But there is also a certain amount of crude politics involved. Long ago, in the first lockdown in March, Starmer was embarrassed by Rebecca Long-Bailey, his Corbynite shadow education secretary, who seemed too keen that schools should close and stay closed. The Conservatives played politics with the subject, accusing her of putting the interests of teacher unions above those of pupils.  

When Long-Bailey removed herself from the shadow cabinet, Starmer took the chance to install Kate Green in her place and to insist that Labour wanted children in school if at all possible. 

He could have used the identification of a more infectious variant of the coronavirus to change policy, but he appeared to be so stung by Boris Johnson’s taunts about wanting to keep schools closed that he stuck closely to the prime minister’s line that closing schools should be the last resort.  

That was why Starmer’s call this week for a national lockdown was so muffled. He wanted a lockdown, but to keep schools open, which meant that he was calling for no significant change in policy from the tier 4 restrictions that already covered three quarters of England.  

This resulted in a particularly poor interview on Sky News yesterday, in which Starmer failed to answer the simple question: did he think all primary schools should close tomorrow? He repeatedly said that school closures should be part of a national plan, which was the soundbite he wanted to deliver. Understandably, he didn’t want to lose his preferred soundbite by giving a more interesting answer to Sam Coates’s follow-up questions, so he simply repeated it. The trouble is that it was a terrible formulation that made him look evasive. The clip brought back vivid memories of Ed Miliband saying, “These strikes are wrong,” in four or five different but consecutive ways in 2011 – ironically in answer to questions about strikes by teachers that were threatening to close down schools.  

Last night, after the prime minister announced Lockdown III, Starmer was reduced to an interview in which he said: “We support the package of measures the prime minister has just outlined.” That was fine. Bipartisan reasonableness – a term I used about Tony Blair’s first appearance on the BBC’s Question Time in 1985 – is always a winner. But Starmer was so ill-prepared that, when Huw Edwards asked if there was anything that Labour thought should be in the measures that wasn’t, the Labour leader initially forgot his party’s standard demand for more support for parents and children at home. 

At a time when the nation was aghast at the apparent incompetence of opening primary schools for a day only to close them again, the leader of the opposition was left looking as if he would have done the same had he been in Johnson’s place.  

It was a far cry from Starmer’s “Captain Foresight” moments, when he was weeks ahead of the prime minister – in demanding a circuit-breaker lockdown in October, and when at the beginning of December he said the tiered restrictions would fail to contain the virus and insisted, to Tory jeers in the House of Commons, that he was just telling them what was going to happen. 

For most of the coronavirus crisis, the contrast has been between a prime minister who seemed to be fumbling, always lagging behind events, and an opposition leader who was dull but competent, with a crisp analysis of the situation that did not always rely on hindsight.  

As the crisis approaches what we hope is its worst phase – in the sense that we hope that the vaccines will finally contain the virus – Starmer seems to have stumbled and let Johnson off the hook.