PMQs Review: The one that was so, so sorry

Boris Johnson speaking at prime minister's questions in the House of Commons - Credit: Parliament

What an odd and, in many ways, sombre prime minister’s questions this was. Odd because Keir Starmer was appearing virtually from home again having been forced to self-isolate after coming into contact with a Covid carrier (Boris Johnson managed this time to suppress his guffaw at the fact that Starmer lives in – ha ha! – North London in contrast to his own solidly commoner credentials).

And sombre not only because it coincided with Holocaust Memorial Day, to which both Johnson and Starmer opened their remarks with. Because last night, possibly for the first time in his life, the prime minister came close to admitting responsibility for something, saying he was “deeply sorry” as the number of coronavirus deaths hit six figures.

Sure, cynics may have found it stage-managed, with Tory-friendly newspapers rallying behind him today, splashing his ashen face over their front pages and conjuring up editorials gushing at his statesmanship and authenticity (the Daily Express was particularly impressed as he “even bowed his head at one point in the proceedings”). Still, what do you expect? At least Nick Clegg suffered the ignominy of seeing his apology autotuned.

Pointing out, where the newspapers failed, that every statistic was “a mum, a dad, a sister, a brother, a friend, a colleague, a neighbour,” Starmer asked: “The question on everyone’s lips this morning is why? The prime minister must have thought about that question a lot, so could he tell us why he thinks that the United Kingdom has ended up with a death toll of 100,000, the highest number in Europe?”.

Johnson agreed that “there will indeed be a time when we must learn the lessons of what has happened”, but added: “I don’t think that moment is now when we are in the throes of fighting this wave of the new variant, when 37,000 people are struggling with Covid in our hospitals”. As this column has noted before, that moment will be in 2026 when Johnson is safely on the other side of the Atlantic, giving speeches to US think-tanks for $200,000 a pop.

Starmer continued, on the slow implementation of quarantine for incomers to the UK and on the lack of laptop provision for children forced to home-school, but few punches landed. Johnson still seems obsessed with making Starmer say schools are safe “in defiance of his union paymasters” rather than, say, in defiance of the fact it was the prime minister himself who closed them all. “It’s prime minister’s questions,” harrumphed an irritable Speaker Hoyle.

Finally, Starmer said he would be speaking to bereaved families later today and asked the prime minister what message he would like to send to them, and not to reply “with a pre-prepared childish gag” as he did the last time he asked such a question (Johnson had said Starmer had “got more briefs than Calvin Klein” in a joke seemingly lifted from a 1983 episode of Only Fools And Horses).

Johnson started normally, saying that “the message I would give those families is the same I’ve given everybody I’ve met: I deeply, personally regret the loss of life, the suffering of their families”. But then he couldn’t help himself, adding that Starmer was “trying to score political points”, repeating his demand for him to say that schools are safe and criticising his questioning of the vaccine task force. All things that the bereaved families would love to hear about, no doubt.

Elsewhere, it remained doleful, with not even one pliant Tory backbencher standing to add if the prime minister was going to build build build for jobs jobs in their constituency. Indeed, some questions reminded him that they could be tricky. Sally-Ann Hart (Hastings and Rye) moaned about the difficulties posed to the fishing industry in her constituency by red tape caused by the Brexit deal, a Brexit deal she herself supported and voted for. And Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds), zooming in from 1958, stressed how he understood the need for lockdown before going on to demonstrate that he didn’t.

In fact, the closest to levity came from Johnson’s response to Christine Jardine (Liberal Democrat, Edinburgh West), who asked about the punitive tariffs on Scotch whisky imposed by the US.

“One of the reasons for leaving the EU is that we will be able to do a free trade deal with the US and to obviate tariffs of the kind that she describes, which would be there in perpetuity if the Scottish Nationalist Party were to get their way and to take Scotland back into the EU,” he roared triumphantly. Which would have worked, were Jardine a member of the SNP. But, as noted, she’s a Lib Dem. It’s the second time he’s done this. Are we quite sure he’s on top of the detail?