Keir Starmer came unstuck at PMQs – and not just when it came to the monarchy

Keir Starmer thought he was going to have a difficult time at Prime Minister’s Questions. An old video had just been unearthed in which he said it was odd to be made a Queen’s Counsel because “I often used to propose the abolition of the monarchy”. But it was merely awkward. He could brush it off as the exuberance of youth – it was 2005 and in the past tense; anyone who isn’t a republican at the age of 20 hasn’t got a heart etc. 

Boris Johnson was bound to mention it, especially because of this morning’s report of public relations advice to the Labour leader that he should wrap himself in the flag and the mantle of patriotism. But the prime minister didn’t get that far, because he had saved it up for his reply to Starmer’s sixth question, knowing that Starmer wouldn’t be able to answer back; as soon as Johnson strayed from the subject at hand to accuse Starmer of looking at focus groups telling him to “stop sitting on the fence”, the speaker intervened to cut him short. 

By then, though, the session had gone wrong for Starmer in an unexpected direction. The Labour leader, the lawyer who is on top of the detail, had come unstuck against the prime minister, the comic light essayist who usually busks it.  

As they clashed over the question of coronavirus border controls, the prime minister said that Starmer wanted to stay in the European Medicines Agency. Starmer was indignant: “The prime minister knows I’ve never said that from this despatch box or anywhere else; the truth escapes him.” 

Indignant but wrong. I assume that Starmer meant that he had never said it as leader of the party, or as a response to coronavirus. But he had certainly said it as shadow Brexit secretary, and from the dispatch box. The video clips were running on Twitter before their exchanges were over. 

Starmer’s fumble was a gift to the prime minister, allowing him to advertise his government’s greatest success – the vaccination programme – and to associate Labour with the EU’s relative failure. Who knows what would have happened if the UK had stayed in the European Medicines Agency. It would have been possible, under emergency provisions in EU law, for the UK to have gone it alone in producing and approving vaccines, but would it have been likely? 

I think not, but whatever the hypothetical history in the Starmerverse, the effect today is that the prime minister got it right and the Labour leader didn’t. Starmer showed his inexperience, and blunted what might otherwise have been a couple of effective attacks. 

The Labour position on closing borders is undesirable, but it is popular. On this, the unexpectedly lawyerly Johnson, with his command of detail, was absolutely right. “It is not practical completely to close off this country,” he said, pointing out that 75 per cent of our medicines come from abroad. But the make-it-up-as-you-go-along Starmer won the exchanges because public opinion is behind the idea of fortress Britain, and has no patience with mere facts such as the Common Travel Area with Ireland, or a list of exemptions to travel bans that runs to several pages.

Starmer also did well with the broad-brush painting of the government as heartless and incompetent over the problem of leasehold flat owners who cannot sell if there is any doubt about the cladding on the outside of their blocks. Johnson was again master of the brief, reciting jargon such as “Ewsy”, or EWS1, a standard of external wall survey that is causing immense problems and hardship. But he had no solutions except to implore the Commons to wait for the chancellor, who will be along in a moment to announce – and pay for – a plan. 

Those Labour gains, however, were overshadowed by a row that will run for the rest of the news cycle over who said what, and what they meant – on the question of who takes credit for the vaccination programme, which is the only subject that most voters care about. 

Starmer set off for Prime Minister’s Questions expecting to have a tough time; he must have come away from it wishing that having to live down his youthful anti-monarchism had been the worst of it.