Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson marked the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths by point-scoring as usual

We might have hoped, on the day after the milestone of 100,000 deaths was passed, for a suspension of party political hostilities at Prime Minister’s Questions today. 

It was not to be. Keir Starmer began by asking why Britain has such a terrible death rate, knowing full well that Boris Johnson cannot give an honest answer, which would probably comprise equal parts of “we don’t know”, “bad luck”, “because we are an open society” and “maybe in hindsight I can think of a few things I might have done differently”. 

Starmer focused on the last of these, and accused the prime minister of having been consistently slow in responding to the coronavirus. This is partly unfair, because in most cases the opposition was not calling for action before the prime minister took it. Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, came a cropper on the radio this morning when he described Eat Out to Help Out as “a mistake”, but when he was asked if he had opposed it at the time, said: “No.”

For that reason, no doubt, Starmer backed up his criticism of the prime minister by changing Labour policy to call for two things the government is not yet doing, so that he can repeat the charge of being too slow if the government ever does them. First he demanded hotel quarantine for all arrivals from abroad; then he asked for teachers and school staff to be vaccinated during the February half-term holiday. 

These are both more complicated than they sound. The border regime is already full of exemptions – for hauliers, politicians and football coaches – and there is in any case the Common Travel Area with Ireland. Unless Ireland closes its borders at the same time, it is hard to see how the policy would work. 

As for vaccinating teachers, it seems presumptuous for a party that criticises the government for failing to follow the science to propose that the government should overrule the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation and push teachers up the order of priorities. My rule for anyone suggesting that any group should get priority for vaccines is that they should be required to specify which group should be moved down the order of priority to make it possible. 

Needless to say, Starmer didn’t do that in his question, and all the Labour Party said in its accompanying news release was that teachers should be given priority “alongside” those aged 50 to 69 – in other words: the 50- to 69-year-olds should be vaccinated more slowly. 

As it was, the prime minister ignored Starmer’s questions, and asked the Labour leader irrelevant questions of his own – which the speaker politely noted were out of order. Johnson demanded that Starmer say schools are “safe”, which everyone knows is a difficult question because, while they are relatively safe for the people in schools, the reason schools are closed is that they are the means by which the virus is transmitted between households. 

So the exchanges limped to their tasteless conclusion. Starmer tried to stop Johnson launching into a prepared partisan tirade by using his sixth and last question to ask what he should say later today to the families who have lost loved ones.

Johnson was utterly shameless in reply, starting off chastened and sombre, saying: “The best thing that we can do to honour the memory of those who have died, and to honour those who are currently grieving, is to work together.” But he went on without pausing for breath to try to score a string of political points against Starmer, accusing him of trying to score political points. He repeated that Labour’s manifesto wanted to “unbundle” the big drugs companies whose vaccine efforts will save us, and he accused Starmer of having attacked the vaccine taskforce, and demanded an apology. “We will go on, with or without his help, fighting the pandemic,” he declared.

We might have hoped for more decorum at such a serious time, or, failing that, at least a serious debate about the merits or otherwise of Starmer’s suggestions. Sadly, we got neither.