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    Johnson/Starmer Archived Message

    Posted by Mary on May 6, 2020, 1:37 pm, in reply to "Re: Hancock on sky"

    Andrew Sparrow must be a Starmer fan -apart from the final sentence!

    'Sir Keir Starmer and other Westminster opposition leaders will be speaking with Boris Johnson over the coronavirus response tomorrow. The Labour leader will raise the need for a “national consensus” on easing the lockdown based around keeping the public safe, a “mass expansion” of contact tracing and protecting key workers, his spokesman said.

    PMQs - Snap verdict

    In a pre-Covid PMQs a Tory prime minister who was riding high in the opinion polls and who was returning to the House of Commons after an illness that left him in intensive care would have been welcomed by such a wall of noise that it would have been hard for any opposition leader to make much of a mark. But, of course, there is no chance of PMQs resuming its shouting match status any time soon (one of the few benefits of this ghastly crisis) and instead Boris Johnson was left looking exposed and diminished as he faced Sir Keir Starmer for the first time.

    As had been widely expected, Starmer was impressive – focused, calm, and rational. His interventions today were crisper than in his previous two outings (probably an improvement), and he always ended with a very direct question, simple yet incriminating. No doubt he could manage in a rowdy Commons, but the courtroom silence seems to suit him better, and the overall impression left by the encounter was of a rather floundering prime minister struggling to respond to a full-on grown-up channelling the questions a critical nation wants answering.

    Another difficulty for the PM in Zoom PMQs is that he can’t pick the brains of the specialist minister sitting alongside him. Prime ministers are normally more reliant on prompts from colleagues at PMQs than people realise, and Johnson looked particular in need of verbal assistance from Matt Hancock when asked about PPE.

    In normal PMQs a struggling PM would resort to sloganising, and hope the backbench noise machine might do the rest, but with that no longer an option it did seem as if Johnson was more reliant on making points of substance. He could not answer Starmer’s questions easily (they were designed to be hard to answer – at least, hard to answer without admitting gross negligence), but he did show some leg on a public inquiry, and provide a relatively revealing answer about why he is making the lockdown announcement on Sunday.

    Starmer will be pleased with how the exchanges went. But if the new format militates against sloganising, then that is potentially a problem for the leader of the opposition too. At his first PMQs against Tony Blair, David Cameron came out with the memorable line about how Blair “was the future once” – a soundbite and a slogan, but a good one, that defined Cameron successfully. A week today, we will remember that Starmer looked the part at his first PMQs, but we are less likely to remember what he actually said.'

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/may/06/uk-coronavirus-live-furlough-scheme-government-ease-lockdown-pmqs-covid-19-latest-updates

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