Keir Starmer forced Boris Johnson to waffle and sound as if he wasn’t serious

The Labour leader has identified Boris Johnson’s weaknesses and remained completely focused on them at Prime Minister’s Questions today. He knows that the prime minister is not good on detail, and that he finds it hard to keep his tone serious for long.

Keir Starmer devoted all six of his questions to the government’s poor record on the prosecution and conviction of rapists. He forced Johnson to waffle. “This is a problem that has been getting worse,” the prime minister said, looking confused. It was as if he didn’t know whether to claim that his was a new government that had just come to power and discovered what a mess his predecessors had made, or that his party had been in power for ages and had been working hard for years to sort out a very difficult problem.

Low conviction rates, said Johnson, were “caused by the data recovery process and the lack of unity, the lack of joined-up thinking between parts of the criminal justice system”. It sounded like waffle, as if the prime minister were regurgitating a half-understood briefing. “That is something that this government is now addressing by more investment, by putting more police out on the streets, and also by having tougher sentences.”

It is interesting that a Conservative prime minister has adopted Labour language, describing higher public spending as “investment”, which shows that, even when Johnson appears to be floundering, he remains aware of where the battle lines are drawn.

By pointing out that the Crown Prosecution Service had recently recruited “at least” 200 people to help to prosecute sexual violence cases, the prime minister forced Starmer to accept that spending had been increased, though the Labour leader countered that “the government can’t pretend that a small budget increase will solve the problem”.

Starmer spoke with the authority of five years as Director of Public Prosecutions, having prosecuted thousands of rape cases. “I don’t need lectures,” he told the prime minister, because he knows the impact of spending cuts over the years.

Johnson clung to the line that Labour had voted against tougher sentences in the Police Bill, which Starmer tried to dismiss by saying he had voted against the bill because it did more to protect statues than women. But then Starmer appeared to admit that tougher sentences are not the answer – which is true, but may not be what the general public wants to hear. The problem is securing convictions, not what happens afterwards.

Johnson called Starmer “weak”; Starmer responded: “You can always tell when he’s losing.”

On the substance, these were unsatisfactory exchanges. The prime minister admitted that there was a problem – he could hardly deny it after Robert Buckland, the justice secretary, apologised for the failings of the criminal justice system last week – and said he was spending a bit more public money on trying to fix it. Starmer said it was not enough, which is always true.

But the Labour leader succeeded in exposing Johnson’s weaknesses. The prime minister was cloudy on the detail and was unable to remain serious for longer than 10 minutes. In his reply to Starmer’s sixth and last question, Johnson switched from the subject of rape to a general attack on the opposition for its inconsistency. “They jabber, we jab; they dither, we deliver; they vacillate; we vaccinate,” he said, in a prepared variation on a familiar sound bite.

Not for the first time, Johnson’s colourful language struck a questionable note. Within minutes, Jess Phillips, Labour’s shadow minister for domestic violence, had issued a press release saying: “For the prime minister to describe questions about rape convictions as ‘jabber’ is disgraceful.”

I’m not sure Starmer himself got the tone right, either. He was laughing when he accused Johnson of “losing”. But it was the prime minister’s attachment to a prepared play on words that really struck the wrong note. Starmer asked serious questions, and he deserved serious, detailed answers.