Keir Starmer again showed his weak leadership by failing to exploit Dominic Cummings’s explosive testimony

Prime Minister’s Questions was an unusual test of Keir Starmer’s leadership. Most MPs – excluding the prime minister himself – had spent the two and a half hours beforehand watching Dominic Cummings’s hypnotic testimony to the joint select committee.

Cummings had laid into Boris Johnson, saying that it was “completely crackers” that he should be prime minister, and that it was a “terrible failure” that the British people were offered the choice between him and Jeremy Corbyn at the last election.

The prime minister’s former chief adviser described such a detailed and colourful horror show of utter uselessness at the heart of government that Johnson should at least have felt a sense of mild peril as he entered the chamber of the House of Commons.

An effective leader of the opposition ought to have been able to turn round the most effective criticisms and deploy them against the prime minister, but Starmer’s attack felt harmless. He quoted Cummings, who said: “When the public needed us most, the government failed.” Unsurprisingly, the prime minister did not agree.

The Labour leader then quoted Johnson’s support for Cummings a year ago, when the prime minister refused to sack him over his lockdown flit to Durham – and asked if Johnson accepted that there had been needless deaths from coronavirus.

Again, the prime minister did not agree. He bolted for the safety of the public inquiry, saying that all these matters would be looked at then. He accused Starmer of “looking backwards”, and tried to distract attention by announcing that everyone over 30 can now get their first vaccine. It wasn’t much of a defence, but it didn’t need to be.

Starmer tried a lighter tone, saying he thought Cummings’s evidence was “getting to the prime minister”. That didn’t work, so he defaulted to the barrister approach, and asked a specific question. Had Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, said he had lost confidence in Matt Hancock, the health secretary? “The answer to that is no,” replied Johnson, which is not what a prime minister fighting for his political life is supposed to say.

At this point Starmer gave up altogether, and decided to set Johnson a logic problem. Either what Cummings said was true, in which case Johnson was useless; or it wasn’t true, in which case it “raises serious questions about the prime minister’s judgement in appointing him in the first place”.

It wasn’t exactly like being savaged by a dead sheep; more like being asked trick questions by a sheep that was only barely alive. There was a bit more life in only one of Starmer’s six questions, when he asked about a phrase attributed to Johnson – but not by Cummings in his evidence that morning. Robert Peston of ITV News had reported yesterday that Cummings “will allege” that the prime minister had said “Covid is only killing 80-year-olds” when he delayed the second lockdown in the autumn.

Johnson didn’t answer Starmer’s carefully worded question about whether he had used those words, “or words to that effect”. Starmer commented on the evasion, as if making a note for the record for the benefit of a dopey judge, but didn’t press the point. Instead, he called pointlessly for the public inquiry to be brought forward to this summer – to which the prime minister was able to say no, and that he was “getting on with the people’s priorities”.

Johnson then went into one of his silly, disjointed series of irrelevant counter-attacks, repeating that Starmer had voted to stay in the European Medicines Agency (with the implication that he would not have been as successful with the vaccines), and winding up with an elaborated version of the slogan he has already used twice in Prime Minister’s Questions: “They vacillate, we vaccinate; they deliberate, we deliver.”

But the feebleness of Johnson’s response was a measure of the feebleness of Starmer’s assault. It was all too easy to imagine how an opposition leader such as John Smith or Tony Blair might have subjected Johnson to withering mockery that might start to deflate his vaccine-driven popularity.