Pummelling Rishi Sunak with Labour’s NHS record is working for Keir Starmer

Prime Minister’s Questions revealed how effective a leader of the opposition who is proud of the last Labour government could be, writes John Rentoul

Starmer ended up by asking a good, if rhetorical, question (PA)

For a long time, the Labour Party has tried to run away from its record. For five years it had a leader who explicitly repudiated everything that New Labour stood for. Today we saw what a mistake that had been. Keir Starmer devoted all his questions to the prime minister to the proposition that the last Labour government had fixed the NHS, and the Conservatives had broken it.

The Labour leader started by pointing out that in all the 13 years of the last Labour government there had been no national NHS strikes, and worked his way, barrister-style, through the reduction of waiting lists achieved by 2010 and in particular the two-week target for suspected cancer cases to be seen by a specialist, which is now exceeded in 50,000 cases. He asked: “When will cancer patients get the certainty of quick care that they got under Labour?”

Starmer ended up by asking a good, if rhetorical, question: is the best that Rishi Sunak can offer people the hope that at some point the government might stop making things worse?