Keir Starmer laid out a damning review of Boris Johnson’s year at PMQs

In what was probably their last clash of the year, the Labour leader tried to hold the prime minister to account for all the mistakes made during the last 12 months, writes John Rentoul

Keir Starmer in the House of Commons (UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor via Reuters)

Keir Starmer, the tough midfielder, swerved around a dirty tackle intended to unnerve him. Michael Fabricant, the Conservative boot boy, called him a “smarmy lawyer” in his first question, notionally addressed to the prime minister.  

Boris Johnson himself tried to put his opponent off by unveiling some actual numbers for the vaccination programme, saying it had got off to a “good start” in its first seven days, with 108,000 inoculated in England and 138,000 across the UK.  

But Starmer ignored these attempts to distract him and pressed ahead with his attempt to sum up the whole year – to the prime minister’s disadvantage. “Since this is probably the last Prime Minister’s Questions of the year”, he said, he wanted to rehearse the charges against the government’s handling of the coronavirus.  

Suddenly the House of Commons was converted into a court, with Starmer the prosecutor opening the public inquiry. He used his first five questions to try to establish that Johnson had been too slow all along, that he had repeatedly refused to act only to be forced to do so shortly afterwards, and that, by defending Dominic Cummings, he had undermined the public trust needed to control the virus effectively.  

Johnson obfuscated and counter-attacked, using any argument that came to mind. First he pretended to be saddened by Starmer’s failure to support NHS staff in all their hard work; then he complained that the Labour leader was “criticising the government’s plan without producing any kind of plan of his own”. But then he crashed on, contradicting himself completely, accusing Starmer of having a plan, but the wrong one: “All he wants to do is lock the whole country down – he’s a one-club golfer.”  

At this point Starmer showed that he had after all felt Fabricant’s crunching tackle, saying that it wasn’t a “smarmy lawyer” who was questioning the prime minister’s plan to relax the rules over Christmas but the British Medical Journal and the Health Service Journal in their joint editorial.  

Johnson seemed to feel he was on stronger ground on recent policy – after all, it hasn’t actually gone wrong yet. “We don't want to criminalise people's long-made plans,” he said, by “cancelling Christmas”, which is what Starmer “would appear to want to do”.  

Instead of offering a summing-up, however, Starmer devoted his sixth and final question to knockabout, reading from the advice for would-be politicians from the Wellingborough Tory association newsletter, starting with: “Say the first thing that comes into your head.”

It was the sort of thing that might get a weak laugh on Have I Got News For You, but it was less than wounding in the chamber. It undermined the case against Johnson that Starmer had quite effectively built up to that point.  

Not that the prime minister’s last word was deployed to any great effect. He simply returned to the theme of Starmer as a chronic abstainer, sitting on the fence: “All I want for Christmas is a view.”  

But in fact, the Labour leader had set out a damning case against the government – always too slow, always promising more than it delivered, always pretending that the virus was about to be beaten – and the prime minister had little by way of reply.