Johnson dodges Starmer’s water pistol and can even boast about sewage

You can’t bank on much these days but one thing’s certain; never underestimate Sir Keir Starmer’s talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Like an England batting collapse at Lord’s, there’s a comforting reliability to it.

For yesterday’s PMQS Boris Johnson had packed his revolver, only for Starmer to turn up with a water pistol.

Loyalists and rebels alike thronged the Tory benches – from Michael Fabricant, beaming reverentially at his boss, to Aaron Bell and William Wragg, smirking shiftily at the back.

As the PM bounded into the Commons his troops heralded him with a guttural roar “YEAHHAAAAH”.

“I couldn’t work out if that noise was cheers or boos,” grinned Starmer. But, from then on, he looked more subdued.

Gallantly avoiding the latest nightmarish economic growth predictions and the not-insignificant matter of two in five Tory MPS knifing the PM in the back on Monday, he chose to lead with one of the few topics Johnson reliably enjoys talking about – the (sorry, “our”) NHS.

The PM looked breezy, blasé even, as he pumped his fists and ranted on about the droves of nurses being hired. Had survival emboldened him?

We were back in Boris-land – that fabled realm of jam, cake, bread and circuses, where everything is brilliant. The Tory MPS cheered and, at every point, Starmer reverted to ponderous, pre-scripted word sludge. “This line of attack is not working,” observed the

PM at one point, accurately enough. Even Starmer’s own backbenchers struggled to make it to the end. Many whipped out their phones and began scrolling. With Chris Bryant on the Deputy Speaker’s bench, the mantle of Labour heckler-in-chief fell to Peter Kyle and Wes Streeting, the latter combining his dual identities of shadow health secretary and overgrown sixth-former. “You two again,” yelled Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle in the manner of a harassed dad on a long car journey. Starmer was more successful in ghoul mode, reflecting on the tragic end of one constituent who had died while waiting for an ambulance. This silenced the Chamber for about half a minute before he lost them again.

By the time we reached backbench questions it almost felt like “business as usual”. Johnson managed to brag of his record on sewage being pumped into rivers with nary a jeer. His confidence grew visibly as he boasted of a “strong, robust economy” (whose?) and even managed that most complex of pirouettes, converting a question about Passport Office chaos into raucous jeers at Labour’s silence on rail strikes. When Esther Mcvey urged him to scrap HS2 to save tens of billions of pounds, he waved her away airily.

It was left to Angela Eagle and Ian Blackford of the SNP to perform more surgical incisions than Starmer’s “autopsy with a butterknife”.

Somehow PMQS produced a clear win for the PM, utterly inconceivable under the circumstances. Had Starmer received his own memento mori from the Durham Constabulary? Was this some sophisticated new variety of 4D political chess, a bid to keep an unpopular PM in power by putting in a truly execrable performance?

Or was he simply that bad?