PMQ'S

No answers, again.

Doubles down on 200000 tests by the month end...gonna be some very very postmen!

This set-up really suits Starmer. More like a coutroom than the normal braying Commons.
Doesn't suit Boris at all as his evasive bumbling is much more obvious bs than when he has the Hooray Henrys behind him.

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Sir Keir Starmer was widely expected to outperform Boris Johnson at PMQs, and in their first encounter last week he duly managed to do so with aplomb. On their second outing you would have expected No 10 to have given some thought to how to mount a more effective response. But there was not much evidence of this, and Johnson was duly skittled.

One problem for Johnson was that some of the usual tactics just don’t work at Zoom PMQs. A outright untruth can win you temporary reprieve in the House of Commons if 300 MPs are cheering you on and it is going to take people a while to work out that you’re mistaken or lying, but Johnson does not have the wall of sound protection he used to enjoy, and denying the existence of a document that Labour were able to circulate within seconds  was just an elementary error. Starmer is not infallible, and there are ways of beating him in an argument. But suggesting that Starmer (the archetypal “swot”, as the PM would put it) is wrong on a point of fact - how naive can you get?

Perhaps he'd simply forgotten to stay alert

Johnson just hasn't got a clue

Answering question he thought he had been asked earlier

Not a good look

I wouldn't rate Johnson as high as that

The loneliness of high office.

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PS - Note that he was unable to STAY ALERT to the helpful seating indicators.

Where's Laura?

I'll speak to no-one before noon and only Laura afterwards.

John Crace https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/13/boris-johnson-resorts-to-bluster-under-keir-starmer-cross-examination

On Monday Boris Johnson was singing the praises of “good old-fashioned British common sense”. A higher order of common sense than French or German common sense, naturally. So it’s unfortunate that this is the very quality he seems to singularly lack. Because you’d have thought the one thing Boris might have learned from his first time up against Keir Starmer at prime minister’s questions last week was that it would be a help to come properly prepared.

But Boris has never done preparation for anything. It’s not in his nature. Preparation is for girly swots. He is a tabula rasa who treats every day as a new beginning. One free from the consequences of any past actions. He is the macho blagger who has always been able to wing it, fuelled by a few gags and some hasty last-minute revision.

Something that might have been good enough, when backed up by a full chamber of braying Tory MPs, to see off Jeremy Corbyn, but that is proving hopelessly inadequate against a top QC in a near-silent courtroom. Things are now so bad that every time Boris opens his mouth, he only encourages the jury to convict him and the judge to increase his sentence.

It’s also possible that Starmer has made the same mistake as many people in severely overestimating Boris’s intelligence. That the long words and the Latin phrases simply cover up the fact the prime minister isn’t particularly bright: after all, it takes a very special type of cleverness to keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

But then old habits die hard for the leader of the opposition too. He has learned from his time at the bar that there’s no such thing as having too much evidence against a defendant, so he was taking nothing for granted by coming to the Commons somewhat over-prepared.

Give it time and Boris may well cut to the chase and just plead guilty in advance to save him the torture of answering six questions, but we’re not there yet, so Starmer opened his folder and asked the court to consider Exhibit A. Care homes. Was it not true that the government had been far too slow to act to protect the most vulnerable members of society? Absolutely not, Boris insisted. No country had done more to protect the elderly. What better protection could anyone get than being killed?

Hmm. That was weird, Starmer said, because in Exhibit B he had a surgeon quoted in the Daily Telegraph – citing the newspaper that up till now had been only too happy to print any old rubbish the prime minister writes was a cruel twist of the knife – saying that the government hadn’t changed its advice on releasing untested patients into care homes until mid-March.

That’s not just true, Boris blustered, sounding guiltier by the second. Even though it was true. Though to accuse the prime minister of lying is to commit a philosophical category error. As Boris has no clue what advice his government has and hasn’t given, he can’t knowingly be untruthful. Nor, given his career track record, show any signs of being able to differentiate between truth and lies. Rather he just recites the answer that he wants to be true and hopes to make it so by willpower alone. And to be fair, it’s a tactic that’s worked often enough in the past.

Starmer moved on to the Office for National Statistics figures for deaths in care homes. Their report suggested there had been an excess death figure of 18,000 people, yet the government was certain that only 8,000 of them had died of the coronavirus. So what did he think the other 10,000 had died of? Boris shrugged. It was a huge mystery. Perhaps some were dying of happiness. Or of over-exertion in the gym during lockdown? Or perhaps they were dying of disappointment that the UK still had not technically left the EU?

“I’m baffled,” said Starmer. Baffled is QC speak for ‘Now I’ve got you nailed, you filthy lying toerag’. Baffled that the government had stopped using the international death rate comparison at the Downing Street press conference, having done so continuously for the past seven weeks.

Boris blustered yet again. It turns out that a prime minister who was supposed to be such a great communicator can now barely talk in joined-up sentences. He has regressed to the pre-verbal stage. “Um … er … ah,” he mumbled.

There was little left of the prime minister but a sodden mess by the time Keir had finished with him, though the SNP’s Ian Blackford was happy to make a few ripples of his own in the pool of blubbery sweat previously known as Boris.

All that Johnson could say in his defence was that his was a roadmap of consensus – the consensus being that he hadn’t bothered to consult Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It appears he was surprised to learn there were so many people in London who needed to use public transport.

In other times it might have been uplifting for the opposition benches to see the prime minister so comprehensively dismantled. But there was little cheering or a sense of satisfaction, because in a time of crisis you rather hope the country would have a leader in whom you could believe.

Someone you could trust to make at least some of the right decisions. But we have Boris. Incompetent, unprepared, selfish, lazy, amoral, and just not that bright. And no matter how many times Starmer batters him with an indefensible charge sheet at PMQs, Boris will remain prime minister for the duration.

Sir Forensic Keir, (from whom all wisdom flows), is continuity Blair without the mateyness.
The radical lefties are going to be disappointed whoever wins the next election.
He would, however, take us a few steps further towards the goals of borderless globalism, green peacefulness and of welcoming all peoples from oppressed lands to vote for more of the same.

I think we are happy with the Socialists in charge for now

Just can't wait for a wave of nationalisation's and milking the Rich ( meaning making them pay their fair share! )

We all know that Bojo is a bumbling self serving  balloon but still has undoubted charm..Cummings however hides himself away even more effectively than his boss...me no likey Cummings.

Apparently SNP too centrist for new Tory supporters.

Michael Foot was a truly excellent politician, an incredibly intelligent man. Great politicians are present in all parties from the past.

As he was an MP from 1945-1983, many of those years in a cabinet role, I think he was the opposite of "completely rejected" by the electorate.

If you are referring to the one election (1983) he was Labour leader (a role he took on very reluctantly), you will find that the Labour and SDP alliance combined vote (53%) was far higher than the Conservatives. If the SDP had not split the Labour vote in multiple constituencies, a different result was certainly possible.

A similar explanation could be made for 80-90% of elections. The fact is he ran on a manifesto which Gerald Kaufman called the longest suicide note in history, and got a result pretty much unrivaled until Corbyn in 2019. Also, laying a wreath at the cenotaph whilst being dressed like a tramp didn't help him in the public eye.

I can easily commend him as a politician, but not as a party leader.

I will rest there lest it becomes an argument rather than a debate, please feel free to have the last word.