Starmer turns the screws at PMQs

For those tuning in to today’s PMQs, the opening squabble between Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer was more “irretrievable data loss” from The Thick of It, than the sombre questioning you might expect the day after the UK saw the highest Covid daily death toll on record.

After giving his pre-prepared statements on Joe Biden (he was looking forward to working with him “on our shared priorities”) and the flooding from Storm Christoph (he will later chair a meeting of the Cobra emergency committee), the Prime Minister assured the House that the government would provide free school meals to those children who are eligible over the February half-term.

Starmer added his own support for Biden, before swiftly moving on to his first topic – the loss of 150,000 police records from the national police computer. Asking Johnson “How many criminal investigations could have been damaged by this mistake?” he was met with the reply that the Home Office was “actively working to assess the damage” and that they hope to be able to “restore the data in question.”

Not content with this answer to his “basic” question, Starmer asked again for a number – “How many convicted criminals have had their records wrongly deleted?” Banging his hand down in frustration, Johnson repeated that they did not know how many cases might be affected, before the two set off on a futile back and forth over figures, with Johnson challenging Starmer over his ability to do a “swift computation”, who retaliated by telling the Prime Minister that he had quoted his own figure wrong.

Starmer then turned to another of the Home Secretary’s responsibilities – borders, demanding to know why the Prime Minister had overruled Priti Patel’s orders to shut the borders last March. Once again, the PM accused “Captain Hindsight” of changing his tune on border controls, and said the government had “instituted one of the toughest border regimes in the world” to protect the British public.

This exact exchange was repeated once more, before Johnson took the opportunity to tell the Labour leader that he was “like watching a weather vane spinning round and round depending on where the breezes are blowing”.

Other questions focused on the vaccine rollout (Rob Butler, Conservative, Aylesbury), vaccine variants (Neil O’Brien, Conservative, Harborough) and fishing (Ben Bradley, Conservative, Mansfield) – to which Johnson replied that Brexit would turn the UK into an ‘El Dorado’ for fishermen.

There was also a question from Ian Blackford, who echoed Theresa May’s recent article in the Daily Mail by questioning Johnson on his “cruel policy” of cutting international aid to the world’s poorest, before a technical error cut him off from the proceedings, eliciting a roar of laughter from the handful of socially distanced MPs. Tant pis.