Humiliating climbdown for Starmer

Sir Keir Starmer has fluffed it, big time. The Labour leader has been forced into the most grovelling apology over a bust-up at PMQs today over whether he did or did not want Britain to be a member of the European Medicines Authority post- Brexit. The upshot is that Sir Keir did indeed want the UK to stay with the EMA.

The bust-up came about because the Prime Minister accused Sir Keir of having supported the UK’s joining the EMA. Indeed, the PM said: “If we’d have listened to the Right Honourable Gentleman, we would still be at the starting blocks because he wanted to stay in the European Medicines Agency… and said so four times from that dispatch box.”

The Labour leader had retorted that this was “nonsense,” adding: “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a pre-prepared gag”.

Sir Keir continued to deny he had ever said the UK should stay, while the PM continued to challenge him. For once, Johnson got under Sir Keir’s unusually shiny skin. It was only when Sir Keir was leaving the Chamber that he vented his fury that the PM had stitched him up. But of course, he hadn’t. Sir Keir stitched himself up, into knots.

But his excuse – which has just come out via a Labour Party release – is that they were old comments that he made, and not recent ones. Well, that’s alright then. But it’s not. The Labour release says this: “On a number of occasions the Prime Minister has wrongly claimed that Labour wanted to join the EU’s vaccine programme. That is inaccurate and the claim has been found to be untrue.”

“This afternoon during Prime Minister’s Questions, Keir misheard the Prime Minister and assumed he was making the same false accusation again.”

“Keir accepts that, on this occasion, the Prime Minister was referring to old comments about the European Medicines Agency and Keir admits he was wrong and made a mistake in his response.”

The row deepened still further when the Labour statement said that the party had “never called for the UK to be in the EU vaccine programme”.

However, that claim was not true either because Sir Keir is on record as having said the UK should stay with the EMA. Hope you have got that because not sure anyone else has.

It was a lively end to what was an otherwise sombre PMQs which started with a minute’s silence in honour of Captain Sir Tom Moore and all victims of the pandemic. Boris Johnson said that the Second World War Veteran’s was “a long life, lived well” and that “as Captain Tom continued to remind us: remember, tomorrow will be a good day”. He encouraged everyone to join a national clap for both Moore and the NHS at 6pm this evening.

After welcoming the clap for Captain Tom, Sir Keir set his sights on the story broken yesterday in the Times that Sage warned Downing Street two weeks ago that only mandatory hotel quarantine for all travellers would prevent new coronavirus strains from arriving in the country. Johnson echoed the government’s strong insistence that the story was a mischaracterisation of Sage advice, adding that it was “not practical” to completely close off the UK as Starmer seemed to be suggesting.

Once again, Johnson insisted that the UK had one of the “toughest regimes in the world” and accused Starmer of trying to “have it both ways” by calling for full border closures with exceptions for freight.