PMQs sketch: Boris Johnson buried in an avalanche of detail

The British public voted for Boris Johnson in December knowing he wasn’t a details man. In fairness to both Johnson and the British public, neither can have known that the world was about to be plunged into a crisis on a scale unseen for a century.

Boris Johnson during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons

But then, it was the British public who voted for the Prime Minister on the strength of his performance in the Brexit referendum campaign and a broken promise to take the UK out of the EU by the end of October. If there’s blame to distribute, maybe it falls more on us than him.

In any case, details are what we’ve all been buried in these past few months - R rates, impossibly large sums and eye-blurring charts filled with squiggly lines that scale mountains of gloom between x and y axis. The details came down the mountain in an avalanche and buried Johnson.

The Prime Minister, red-faced beneath a haystack of blonde more unruly than ever, has rarely looked less confident. By contrast, Sir Keir Starmer was again the personification of calm and precision: a Swiss mountain engineer setting off that avalanche of detail with the faintest puff of pyrotechnics.

And who’s cutting the Labour leader’s hair, by the way? Every strand controlled in its place, like his arguments.

Starmer quoted guidance to care homes in England that was on the UK Government website until 12 March, which claimed it was “very unlikely that people receiving care in a care home…will become infected.”

“Does the Prime Minister accept that the Government were too slow to protect people in care homes?”

Johnson fell into the first of the traps that Starmer is proving so effective at laying for him. “It was not true that the advice said that—and actually, we brought the lockdown in care homes ahead of the general lockdown,” the Prime Minister claimed. Except that is what the guidance said, despite Downing Street’s desperate attempt to clear up the mess later.

Johnson was also left without excuses when Starmer waved a slide from a government press briefing comparing coronavirus death rates - now absent from the daily updates since the UK became the worst-hit country in Europe.

“He seeks to make comparisons with other countries that I am advised are premature,” Johnson stuttered. “I am baffled,” Starmer said, with the closest he came to a smile. “It is not me seeking to draw the comparisons; these are the Government’s slides, which have been used for seven weeks to reassure the public.”

With little noise in the Commons chamber, the Prime Minister could only bellow his approval for “the common sense of the British people'' to reclaim his authority. When a Conservative MP asked about the future of the Hay on Wye book festival, setting up the line for Johnson that it would be “Haye on Wifi” this year, a look of relief crossed his face as he made the gag. Finally, an escape from the details.

It used to be said that only political obsessives watch PMQs - but half the country either isn’t working, or working from home. In the week that Starmer’s net approval rating passed Johnson’s, I wonder what the ratings are now.

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