Starmer scores extra-time winner while Hancock gets wearier each day

First: a correction. In yesterday’s sketch I may have given the impression that this week’s PMQS was a draw. I was wrong. Sir Keir Starmer won.

It’s just that he did it a day late. On Wednesday the Labour leader spent PMQS pressuring Boris Johnson to drop the immigrant health surcharge for NHS staff. It was unjust, said Sir Keir, that NHS doctors and nurses who’d been born abroad should be made to pay hundreds of pounds a year to receive treatment themselves.

Mr Johnson disagreed. He told Sir Keir to “look at the realities”. The immigrant health surcharge was worth “about £900million” to the Treasury. So in his view, making immigrant doctors and nurses pay extra was “the right way forward”.

Yesterday afternoon, however, Mr

Johnson backed down – and decided they shouldn’t have to pay the surcharge after all. A one-nil win for Sir Keir, in extra time.

All the same, though, it shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as a setback for Mr Johnson. U-turns aren’t always a sign of weakness. In fact, they can be a sign of strength. Because a good leader listens. And a good Leader of the Opposition forces him to do so.

The news broke minutes before the daily No10 press conference, which was hosted by Matt Hancock. That poor man. He seems wearier by the day. Yesterday he looked like a father having to supervise a six-year-old’s birthday party in a soft play centre. On a Sunday morning. With a hangover.

At one point, he urged the public to keep playing by the rules, so that the Government could restore more of the things “that make life worth living”. He then audibly sighed. Naturally journalists asked about the surcharge U-turn. A man from ITV wanted to know what had happened in the past 24 hours to make Mr Johnson change his mind. Mr Hancock seemed to think that actually it wasn’t a

U-turn; Mr Johnson’s comments at PMQS, he claimed, had merely been about the immigrant surcharge “as a whole”. (This isn’t true. Sir Keir’s questions were specifically about applying the surcharge to NHS staff, and Mr Johnson’s answers were, too.)

The BBC’S Laura Kuenssberg wanted to know Mr Johnson’s thinking, too. Mr Hancock replied that the Prime Minister had “clearly himself been a beneficiary of carers from abroad”. None the less, he defended the principle of the surcharge in general.

“Its purpose is a fair one,” he said. “It’s to ensure that everybody contributes to the NHS.”

A curious remark. Because, as Mr Hancock surely knows, immigrants already do contribute to the NHS – and they do it the same way everyone else in the country does. That is: by paying taxes. Bearing this in mind, you might well wonder: why should any immigrant pay this substantial extra charge, let alone the ones who work for the NHS?

The next PMQS is in two weeks. Perhaps Sir Keir will ask then.