Why the battle between Johnson and Starmer is about to ‘level up’

Backing a short, sharp ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown is a shrewd move by the Labour leader, writes Sean O'Grady – and will undoubtedly increase the hostility between the pair

Starmer’s elegant trap puts the PM in an impossible position (PA)

With the invaluable assistance of the government’s own scientific advisers, Keir Starmer has set his first political trap for Boris Johnson, and the prime minister lumbered straight into it. Despite some spirited attempts at Prime Minister’s Questions to scramble out of the trap set for him by the Labour leader, Johnson remains truly, madly, deeply in an embarrassing hole.  

The trap is a thing of rare beauty. The prime minister has ignored the scientific advice he said he would always be entirely governed by, and refused to organise a short “circuit-breaker” national lockdown, among other measures. Starmer said he would back such a move, based on the unimpeachable expert advice. Handily it happens to be backed by the public too, and particularly among older voters, a weak spot for Labour in the recent past. Starmer knows he cannot lose politically.

If, as seems likely, Johnson does have to go for such a short sharp lockdown in the coming weeks, Starmer will be vindicated, and the prime minister shown to be both wrong and irresolute, executing another U-turn quite against the wishes of his restive backbenchers.  

If, on the other hand, Mr Johnson persists with his “regional approach” to keep the economy going then he will most likely be faced with ever worsening hospitalisations and, alas, fatalities across the country, an economic crisis and in some areas severe or overwhelming strain on the NHS. And then no-deal Brexit will arrive to make matters worse.

Genuinely, Starmer and Johnson want to do what is best for the country, and have tough choices to make – Johnson far more than Starmer. But the Labour leader has the advantage of being right as well as sincere, which is why his policy is more than mere positioning and “opportunism” as the PM, shamelessly, claims.

Having broadly followed a consensual approach at the start of the coronavirus crisis, which roughly coincided with the start of Starmer’s leadership, the leader of the opposition and his shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, have gradually edged away towards “constructive opposition” and a more edgy style of questioning. Failures on testing in particular invited more aggression from Labour. Now there is the first clear break between the front benches on the fundamental strategy.  

The trend away from consensus towards outright confrontation has been accompanied by some harsher personality politics. Johnson likes to call Starmer “m’learned friend” and “Captain Hindsight”, implying a lawyer’s ability to adopt any brief, a mercenary quality to the opposition’s tactics, a cynical willingness to exploit the crisis for party advantage.

For his part Starmer condescends to the prime minister and treats him like a rather slow-witted defendant at a criminal trial, and an incompetent one at that. Both accuse the other of “opportunism”, as if it was some shucking novelty in political life.

No doubt there will be much more of this as the Johnson-Starmer rivalry matures into something ever more acrid. Starmer will at some point have to define much more clearly what he and his party stand for on some intractable issues. There are tricky questions to answer. Would Labour rejoin the EU? How would they pay for the vast Covid debt? Do they support an independence referendum for Scotland? How would they level up the north? Are they ashamed of Britain’s history?  

Johnson and his colleagues, in other words, have ample scope to prepare their own traps for Starmer.