Usually, a party leadership victory would ensure front-page headlines, interview spreads, and immense exposure across the various news channel. However, the extraordinary times we are in meant that until recently Keir Starmer’s leadership had been a quiet one. Nevertheless, Boris Johnson has now been served notice by his opponent that he means business.
Last week the Labour leader put the PM to the sword over the death toll in care homes, unearthing the pre-March 12 government guidance to care homes that stated: “it remains very unlikely that people receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected”. Then, referring to ONS figures that suggest at least 40% of COVID-19 deaths have occurred in care homes, he asked the PM to take responsibility and accept the government was too slow to act.
Instead of accepting, Johnson falsely claimed that the government advice put forward by Starmer was not true, but the leader of the opposition had the evidence to hand. After PMQs Starmer also issued a letter to the PM asking him to correct the record, but Johnson again refused to do so. Seemingly the PM is forgetting he is now standing across from a lawyer at the despatch box, and you would have thought he would have learned his lesson from the warning shot the previous week.
Two weeks ago, again at PMQs, the Labour leader asked the PM why he could possibly think the UK’s handling of COVID-19 has been a success considering we now had the second-highest death toll globally. When the PM responded by saying now was not the time to make international comparisons, Starmer waved around the government’s own comparison charts, highlighting his initial point.
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