PMQs: Boris’s attack lines fail to land on Labour’s “new management”

The final Prime Minister’s Questions before the summer recess encapsulated the government’s difficulties in attacking its new opponent. Sir Keir Starmer’s lawyerly manner and his willingness to distance himself from his predecessor made it difficult for Boris Johnson to land a punch.

Today’s back-and-forth centred on the Intelligence Committee’s report into Russian influence in British democracy, which highlighted a failure by successive governments to defend against Russian espionage. After noting his own role in coordinating the international response to the Salisbury poisonings while he was Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister was eager to flip the script over to the other side.

Johnson’s plan was obviously to use Jeremy Corbyn’s unseemly response to Salisbury to taunt the new Labour leader. Starmer had “sat on his hands and said nothing while the Labour Party parroted the line of the Kremlin when people in this country were poisoned at the orders of Vladimir Putin,” he said.

But the PM’s claim was declared null and void by two inconvenient facts. First, Starmer was able to point to his tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions, where he was involved in bringing proceedings against former KGB agent Andrey Lugovoy on behalf of the family of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian dissident who died after being poisoned with radioactive polonium.

Secondly, Starmer was more than willing to distance himself publicly from, and implicitly criticise, his predecessor:

“In case the Prime Minister hasn’t noticed, the Labour Party is under new management,” he wittingly responded, taking the opportunity to remind the public that the Labour brand has moved on from the toxicity of Corbynism.

Starmer’s team have since pointed to an appearance on Question Time in 2018, in which he condemned Salisbury as “an appalling attack using military grade nerve agents… and it deserves to be condemned by all of us without reservations.” He even appeared to support Theresa May’s theory of events over Corbyn’s with this statement: “There is no alternative explanation other than the responsibility lies with Russia.”