Keir Starmer has a cunning plan to prop up Boris Johnson by asking useless questions

I can only assume that Keir Starmer has a cunning plan. Knowing that Boris Johnson is in deep trouble, the Labour leader is desperately trying to keep him in place. There can be no other explanation for such a poor performance at Prime Minister’s Questions today.

With expectations of their weekly clash higher than usual, Johnson made sure he was seen to be engaged in animated conversation with Rishi Sunak, his hostage and protector, behind the speaker’s chair before he took his place on the front bench to orchestrated Conservative cheers and spontaneous Labour laughter and boos.

Starmer decided to ask about the NHS. Everyone knows that this is what Labour leaders do when they are on the defensive. The NHS is “Labour’s issue”, the safest of safe ground for the party that founded the national religion.

Starmer took as his text Nadine Dorries’s drive-by shooting of Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary and leader of the no-confidence faction, whom she accused of leaving the NHS “wanting and inadequate” when the pandemic hit. I am told that Johnson doesn’t do as much preparation for PMQs as any of his recent predecessors, but even if he had on this occasion, I don’t think his advisers would have spent much time preparing him for this line of questioning. Johnson busked it, as usual, burbling about “an entirely novel virus” and praising the NHS for its success on vaccines.

Starmer came back to that phrase “wanting and inadequate” a couple of times, but it felt like ancient pre-pandemic history, as he tried to say that the NHS was in a terrible state before Johnson became prime minister. That is true, but the attempt to present current problems as the result of 12 years of Tory misrule drifted off into the middle distance.

Starmer listed damning facts about cancer waits and the state of NHS buildings that ought to have engaged everyone’s sympathies but he sounded as if he were reading out a particularly dull committee report. Johnson was so surprised that he exclaimed with childlike incredulity that he could not believe that the “party of Bevan” was complaining about NHS spending which it had voted against.

He offered what he pretended was a dispassionate commentary on his opponent’s line of questioning, describing it as “satirical”, coming from the party of PFI. No one knows anything about the private finance initiative, but they know it is bad and that Labour did it, so that produced a cheap cheer from the Tory benches. Tory MPs were so horrified by their collective private disloyalty on Monday that they would have cheered anything.

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Starmer read out some quotations from Jesse Norman’s letter, in which the former Treasury minister told the prime minister he had no confidence in him and was surprisingly rude and personal. But Johnson was merely factual when he observed: “This line of attack is not working.” Both sides of the Commons knew that to be true, and were equally puzzled by Starmer’s failure to roast the wounded prime minister.

Only on his sixth and final question did Starmer at last succeed in silencing the House with a story of human pain, someone who called an ambulance six times because their mother had difficulty breathing. In the last call, after an hour, he rang to say she was dead. The prime minister had no answer, and after the briefest of pauses to pay his respects launched into a standard recitation of the government’s achievements, saying that he was getting on with his job and hoping that Starmer would continue with his.

And that was it. Two days after Johnson was humiliated by 40 per cent of the MPs behind him, Starmer didn’t have a single memorable line to drive home the opposition’s advantage. The Labour leader read out an overlong series of familiar criticisms, looking down at his notes more than he looked at the miscreant in the dock.

Johnson, on the other hand, had a hand in his pocket and not a care in the world, not bothering to consult his notes once – at one point admitting that he was reciting “from memory” a list of NHS spending figures. They were probably all wrong – Full Fact will no doubt tell us shortly – but his broader point stands, which is that the government is spending large amounts of additional money on the NHS and Labour isn’t proposing to spend more.