I hope we can develop a virus… I mean a vaccine! Oops, it was that kind of day for Boris, says HENRY DEEDES who watched the perky PM flannel his way through a public grilling and a nit-picking performance from Sir Keir Starmer QC

Boris was hosting the Downing Street Press conference, where he faced a barrage of questions from journalists and members of the public on his plans to ease the lockdown. 

First observation: he appears to have got some sun on his face over the Bank Holiday weekend. Amazing how much perkier he looked.

Otherwise it was a bumbling hour’s worth of questions. No one can doubt the PM is in a fiendishly difficult position but his responses really were tatty around the edges.

Someone called Scott from Devon asked whether he could now meet with other friends and family in the park.

Boris replied that you can gather with one other member outside your household, so long as social distancing remains observed. Scott looked baffled. How will this be enforceable?

Simon from Essex asked how he would return to work without childcare available. Boris admitted it was ‘an obvious barrier… that I’m sure employers will agree with, so stay at home if you can.’

Pooja from Solihull claimed the PM’s Sunday night statement had left the country with ‘more questions than answers’. It was rather hard to disagree.

It had been a testing afternoon for the PM. Sir Keir Starmer QC was in the Commons earlier to pass judgment on the Government’s new lockdown strategy.

The Leader of the Opposition had weighed up the case and, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, had reached the studied conclusion that ‘clarity and reassurance was in short supply’.

Rocking back and forth on his heels, he raised the still ink-wet ‘Covid-19 Strategy Recovery’ document aloft with a rococo twirl of the wrists.

It was his considered legal opinion, he announced, that said document contained more holes than a colander.

Exhibit A in Sir Keir’s prosecution concerned a lack of guidelines on people returning to work. He informed the House that details of this could be found on ‘page 25 section B’ of the new document. Yes, he actually gave the paragraph.

There were further gripes with the language in a section marked ‘Guidelines for the workplace’. This we were told could be found on page 22.

We continued in this detailed, overtly nit-picking vein for several more minutes. 

 ‘Mr Speaker there are lots of questions,’ he declared reaching his conclusion. ‘But precious few answers.’

The Prime Minister’s response to his opponent would probably not have been considered altogether satisfactory by a courtroom. We were rather short-changed in the details department.

He had spent most of Sir Keir’s speech squiggling distractedly in the margins of his notes. Many of us predicted this sort of thing would happen when Starmer became leader. He would ask probing questions of Boris who would in turn largely ignore them.

As Boris continued to flannel, the Labour benches groaned in frustration.

Their mood soured further when the PM suggested what was going to be needed during this complicated period of readjustment was ‘some old fashioned common sense.’

Common sense! To Lefties, the mere mention of the word is like presenting Superman with a shard of gleaming kryptonite. It simply terrifies them.

Stephen Doughty (Lab, Cardiff S & Penarth) grimaced so hard that he looked as though he’d just bit down hard on a crab apple. People need to be told what to do, for Heaven’s sake! 

As the Prime Minister stood to leave, he engaged in some Wodehousian small talk with Sir Desmond Swayne (Con, New Forest W).

‘How are you Dessie?’ he chuntered. ‘Alive,’ came the response.

Boris: ‘Good to hear!’ I fear that may be about as jovial as his exchanges in the House go for a while.