PMQs: Starmer calmly dissects coronavirus response in first outing

When Keir Starmer first decided to run for the Labour leadership, winning the contest would not have been a completely astonishing idea. But nobody could have told him that he would be taking up the new role amid a global pandemic requiring a nationwide lockdown. He could not have foreseen that he would be putting questions in his first PMQs session to Dominic Raab because the Prime Minister would be recovering from the deadly virus. Nor that parliament would be making history in half virtual form. Nor that he would be having to ask about the numbers of frontline workers dying to protect the country.

Starmer made a big deal of introducing a new style of opposition when he was elected. In his victory speech video, the Labour leader promised to “engage constructively with the government, not opposition for opposition’s sake”. His approach to opposition during the coronavirus crisis has become increasingly controversial within the party, mostly from the left but Alastair Campbell has also urged a different course. But his chosen style did prove effective at PMQs this afternoon.

Starmer was helped by the almost unprecedented silence in the chamber: there was no jeering from MPs, who are mostly confined to their homes and only contributing via Zoom. The key difference, though, was that he listened to the answers and responded to the comments made. Too often, PMQs on both sides of the House has turned into a bid to secure clips of leaders for social media, which means neither politician at the despatch box listens to each other. Avoiding this method resulted in a coherent head-to-head debate, and gave Starmer his sharpest response. “I didn’t need correcting because I gave the figure for the actual tests a day,” he told Raab when the PM’s deputy tried to ‘correct’ him on numbers.

The Labour leader settled on a question to which nobody seems to have gotten a real answer when he pointed out: “Demand is there… It’s not about driving up demand.” Just why exactly is the government celebrating increased testing capacity while not being able to show a similar increase for tests conducted daily? After all, its 100,000-a-day target refers to actual tests. It was necessary but heart-wrenching to hear that 69 NHS workers have died from coronavirus, and then equally crushing to be told that the government doesn’t have “the precise figures” for care home staff deaths.

Raab did seem rattled by these calmly delivered inquiries. He started attacking Welsh Labour’s Vaughan Gething, which undermines the insistence of many ministers that any kind of scrutiny amounts to mean-spirited ‘politicising’ of the public health crisis. Overall, what we saw today is what many expected of Starmer: a confident and intelligent performance. The challenge for this Labour leader is whether he can be as skilled at changing the narrative as he is matching the mood of his electorate.