Keir Starmer is no Wilson or Blair, but he made life difficult for Boris Johnson at prime minister’s questions

The Conservative Party is in a state of high anxiety. The Commons chamber was full, after last week’s thin turnout on the government benches. “I see they’ve turned up this week, Mr Speaker,” Keir Starmer observed as he asked his second question against a barrage of orchestrated noise.

Before the session began, a Tory whip scuttled along the government front bench to tell Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, to move up so that he would be sitting next to Boris Johnson, who has endured three weeks of terrible headlines now. This was intended to convince TV viewers that all is amity at the top of government; all it did was tell us that the Tories are really worried about mutually hostile briefings from Nos 10 and 11 Downing Street.

Starmer’s first question was short and sharp: “At the last election, the prime minister promised that nobody would have to sell their home to pay for care. That’s another broken promise isn’t it?”

The answer was “no”, but the explanation was so complicated that Tory MPs cheered in a state of blissful ignorance, while Labour MPs shouted angrily in a similar state. What Johnson did was explain how the existing system works, namely that if you need care while you or your partner live in your own home, the value of your house is not assessed for means-tested help.

The problem arises if you have to move into a care home. Then the value of your home is taken into account, and it was this that Johnson promised to end in his manifesto. Yes, he has broken that promise – and Starmer was keen to press home that point, but Labour has a problem. The implication might then be that Labour wants to do more to protect the inheritances of the children of rich homeowners in the south and east.

So Starmer had to switch his line of attack, complaining that Johnson had “put up tax on every working person in the country” to pay for a social-care plan that will mainly benefit the better-off.

He failed to turn the corner cleanly enough. He could attack Johnson for breaking his promises, or he could attack him for taxing the poor to pay for the rich, but trying to do both at once required more dexterity than Starmer possesses. He spent too long trying to rebut Johnson’s answers with details of someone with £100,000 of assets, most of it tied up in their home, who would lose £80,000, that he lost all the cut and thrust of that first question.

Johnson, on the other hand, was as slippery and crowd-pleasing as ever, brushing aside the detail in favour of sweeping generalities. Labour governments “haven’t had the guts to fix it”, he said, almost as if he meant: I may be making a right mess of this, but at least I’m trying. This is “something left over from the Attlee government”, he said, and Tory MPs roared happily.

Starmer had a number of good lines. He pointed out that support from Tory MPs was ebbing away – “look at the vote” on social care on Monday, he said, when the government’s majority was cut by two-thirds. He referred indirectly to speculation about letters from Tory MPs demanding a vote of confidence in Johnson’s leadership: “Who knows if he’ll make it to the next election, but if he does, how does he expect anyone to take his promises seriously?”

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After a particularly rambling reply from the prime minister, the Labour leader said: “I think he’s lost his place in his notes again.”

But Starmer couldn’t break through Johnson’s defences. He used his sixth and last question to list the prime minister’s recent troubles. He quoted an anonymous Tory MP who described No 10 as “embarrassing”. He called Johnson a con-man, which I think is an unparliamentary term, whose role was to distract the punters while Sunak picked their pocket. And he ended by repeating the question asked by a TV reporter after Johnson lost his place in his CBI speech: “Is everything OK, prime minister?”

It was all a bit long, laboured and obvious. Harold Wilson or Tony Blair would have made fun of Johnson with wit, economy and sharp political analysis. Starmer just isn’t in their league as a leader of the opposition, but he still managed to make Johnson look sheepish and defensive – and as if he needed the chancellor’s visible presence by his side and the Tory benches’ audible support to get through it.