It’s been a few weeks since Boris Johnson jibed Keir Starmer with his alliterative soundbite of choice: “we vaccinate, they vacillate!” And given the past week of wibbly-wobbly, hokey-cokey pronouncements from him and his government, it’s perhaps fitting that the PM has laid off that particular attack line. 

In a dizzying few days of dithering, Johnson exempted himself from isolation rules then isolated himself, his ministers contradicted him on the need to obey Covid ‘pings’ and key policy on critical workers changed by the hour. 

The National Insurance rise to pay for social care was on and then off. The NHS pay rise was off and then on. Compulsory Covid passports were revived from the dead, just weeks after being quietly euthanised by Michael Gove. 

At times, the PM looked like Gromit desperately trying to lay new track in front of his train of state as it sped towards the parliamentary recess. But although getting over the line of the summer break may stop backbenchers from gathering in grumbly groups in the Commons tea room, ministers know there are gruelling weeks ahead. 

At the heart of the problem lies a fundamental confusion in Johnson’s pandemic strategy. He (backed by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, to be fair) has decided England will become the first country in the world to open up a country from lockdown precisely at the point when cases are soaring.

But instead of honestly admitting that his objective is a form of herd immunity  – ie “hybrid immunity” stemming from infections and vaccinations – the PM is telling the public to be cautious and “slowly” take full advantage of all the freedoms he has now granted.

There’s an easy answer to the “if not now, when?” question about full unlocking: mid-September, when all of the adult population has been offered a second jab. The PM counters that keeping restrictions in place until then would simply delay the covid wave, not suppress it. And a wave in summer is easier for the NHS to cope with than a wave in winter, he adds. 

Yet on that logic, being cautious and not “tearing the pants out of it” simply delays the wave too. Isolating after “ping” from the App delays the wave. Wearing masks delays the wave. Meeting outdoors delays the wave. But the PM says he doesn’t want to delay it. It’s hard to think of a more confused and chaotic public health policy, especially during a pandemic.

It would be more honest if Johnson admitted he wants the maximum number of infections this summer, just short of tipping the NHS into a serious crisis. And helpful if the department of health told us just what level of infections it thinks the NHS can cope with before lurching into that meltdown.

The other objective for opening up fully is to help ease the pain of businesses and all those who work in them. But if you’re then effectively telling the public not to use those businesses, because they should be “careful”, what is the point? That’s why, whenever Johnson was asked to define what tearing the pants out of it meant, he struggled with specifics.

It’s possible that the real, unstated reason for Freedom Day was not just “hybrid immunity”, but because ministers can see that young people simply aren’t going to be double jabbed in big numbers by mid-September anyway. Take-up rates are worryingly lower than older age groups, so if government waits for the magic 80% double-jabbed figure, it could be waiting indefinitely.

I suspect that’s what really lies behind Johnson’s drive for compulsory Covid passports. They will drive up jab rates, while giving attendees of nightclubs, football matches, music gigs (and cinema and theatre goers, and maybe indoor pub goers?) the security that they will be mixing with similarly protected people. Compulsion will also drive demand for booster jabs over the winter.

The big issue however over coming weeks will be just when restrictions are reintroduced. Johnson has already tried to soften up opinion this week by saying he merely “hoped” his roadmap would be “irreversible”. 

Would it make sense to have a roadmap back into lockdown, just as he had one out of lockdown? I used to think so, as it would allow individuals and businesses to plan their next steps.

But the problem may fundamentally be that the virus doesn’t respond to graduated steps. If you really want to flatten (not delay) a sombrero of cases, a hard and fast lockdown may be the only answer. Just reimposing masks and working from home may not cut it.

Yet given how confused and contradictory the current policy is, it wouldn’t be surprising if the policy that replaces it is similarly incoherent. Learning to “live with Covid” is obviously where we need to end up, but that requires maximum vaccinations for genuine herd immunity. It also requires more honesty from government about what its real strategy is.

The latest data on Friday suggests the third wave may, just, be peaking. But I’ve genuinely no idea if that’s what No.10 wants, or if it wants to ride the wave for a few more weeks.

Deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam this week repeated his advice to avoid places with the ‘3 Cs’ overlapping: closed settings, with crowds and close contacts. Unfortunately, the real ‘3 Cs’ that have defined Johnson’s policy are chaos, confusion and contradiction.

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It was at just after dawn, at 5.14 am, that Keir Starmer was passed the intel that his party was close to winning its first new MP under his leadership. Already wide awake at his north London home, he got the news from the local campaign team in Batley and Spen that the Tories had called for a “bundle check” of votes at the by-election count.

“That was the puff of white smoke that we’d pulled off a big win,” one insider tells me. That feeling that this was indeed a big win, albeit with a small majority (323 votes), summed up the mix of joy and relief among Labour MPs, volunteers and staffers who had thrown everything into the seat in the past week. It was the dawn chorus they needed.

When the result was confirmed at 5.27am, Starmer swiftly tweeted that Kim Leadbeater was a “brilliant and brave” candidate who had run a “positive campaign of hope”. And when he joined her in the constituency, he repeated the main messages of the day: “Labour is back”, “Kim is Labour at its best” and “this is just the start”.

But Starmer now needs to answer the question: start of what? On one simple level, it’s the start of getting into the habit of winning again. If the Hartlepool by-election was the political equivalent of electric shock therapy, Batley felt to some MPs like their party was waking up from a coma. Many felt it had been a mistake to let Hartlepool obscure other successes on May 6 in big city mayoralties and southern councils.

For several MPs, however, the most important “start” will be a new confidence from Starmer himself, coupled with a fresh strategy for reconnecting with lost voters. When he addresses the parliamentary Labour party of MPs and peers on Monday night, he is expected to set out just how determined he is to change the party’s perceptions among the public.

When Leadbeater takes her seat in the Commons chamber, just metres from the shield dedicated to her late sister Jo, there will be more than a few tears on both sides of the House. The PLP meeting will be held by Zoom, but if it were held on Committee Room 14, one can imagine the cheers would be heard far away down the corridor.

Leadbeater is in some ways the answer to the definitional questions that Starmer has himself struggled to provide over recent months. Her overriding message of unity over division, of a sense of healing the nation after both Brexit and the Covid pandemic, will have to be Labour’s main pitch at the next election.

Starmer has tried his own version of that message at various points recently, not least as Boris Johnson pushes his “Red Wall, red meat” strategy of fuelling “culture war” grievances (real and imagined) alive. But Leadbeater is the living embodiment of the idea that there is common ground among much of the public, if only politicians have the bravery to embrace it.

And it’s somehow fitting that the new MP for Batley and Spen may well owe her victory to the viral video clip that many in Labour feel was the real turning point in the contest. Not the grainy CCTV of Matt Hancock’s “hypocrisy hug”, but the footage of Leadbeater standing up to an anti-LGBT activist who tried to shout her down in the street.

Tory voters in more rural parts of the constituency gave the feedback that they were struck by her courage, and her message that she was a real local. Older Asian voters were similarly impressed, I’m told. Leadbeater had never lived anywhere other than the constituency (she had lived in eight different homes in the same seat, which is quite something) and it showed.

Similarly, her focus on potholes and policing resonated. We’ve seen in both Hartlepool (where the Labour council was blamed for poor public services) and Chesham (where the Tory council was blamed for national planning reforms) that the local/national dynamic can swing by-elections. In Batley, Labour pinned the blame for the police station closure on national cuts.

Naturally, when such fine margins are involved, there will always be multiple reasons found for the result (the Greens losing a candidate, Galloway winning some former Heavy Woollen District independents instead of the Tories, Labour’s huge ground operation, Conservative near-silence, a string of right-wing candidates). Yet in our first-past-the-post system, a win is always a win, and no more so than in a by-election.

Starmer signalled today that instead of facing a summer leadership challenge, he would now carry out his plan for a summer meet-the-voters campaign. “As we come out of the pandemic and out of restrictions..the space finally opens up for me to make the arguments about the future,” he said. I’m told that jobs and crime will be the focus, tying together economic and physical security.

Labour MPs certainly hope that there will be a new energy and directness to Starmer’s leadership, and say that even a narrow win in Batley can create the momentum (with a small ‘m’) he has long needed. They hope that he can follow-through with bolder messaging to use party conference as a platform for finally showing the public who he really is.

The danger is that Starmer just banks the win, and repeats what he’s been doing the past six months. The opportunity is that Batley proved, like Chesham, the PM has lost his invincibility cloak. It also highlights the perils of complacency, both on the part of local Tory campaign and on the part of the PM in not sacking Matt Hancock.

The hard fact is that Labour had just 198 MPs before Batley and it still has just 198 MPs after it. Though it may be hoping for a return to ‘normal’ politics after the pandemic, there’s nothing normal about the huge challenge the party still faces. Edging it in a by-election is not the same as the real confidence boost of being consistently ahead in the national polls.

Most of all, to become the ‘change’ candidate at the next election, some of his MPs believe Starmer has to do more to show he has changed Labour and will change Britain. But at least Kim Leadbeater has provided a glimmer of hope that he can win back some of the Tory votes he needs.

Another PMQs, another tone deaf performance from Boris Johnson. Last week, he appeared to belittle Keir Starmer’s concern over low rape conviction rates as mere “jabber”. This week, he seemed to dismiss anger over Matt Hancock’s Covid rule breach as “Westminster bubble” chatter.

In both cases, allies of Johnson say such attacks are unfair as it was clear he was hitting back at Starmer rather than the issues he raised. Well, upto a point, Lord Copper. In failing to separate out the issues, with the change in register needed for each, the PM has no one to blame but himself for the criticism.

Starmer has long been advised by older hands on the Labour benches to mix up his bowling speed, shifting from fast balls to slower off-spin, and it worked today. By contrast, Johnson stuck to his usual attack-as-best-form-of-defence tactic, and it failed.

First, the Labour leader ridiculed Johnson’s claim to have sacked Hancock a day after keeping him (Starmer must have been tempted to accuse the PM of being ‘Captain Hindsight’ on that one). Then he changed the tone to raise the fury of the parents of a dying cancer patient who was denied hospital visits the week before Hancock broke the social distancing rules with his mistress.

When Starmer quoted Ollie Bibby’s mother – “I’m livid. We did everything we were told to do and the man that made the rules didn’t” – Johnson should have spotted it was time to change gear himself and issue a heartfelt apology. If indeed he had sacked Hancock, as he implied, surely it wouldn’t be difficult to condemn his former health secretary’s actions?

Instead, the tone deaf PM gave a perfunctory answer about sharing the grief of families like Ollie’s, before launching swiftly into his charge that Starmer was raising matters that were the stuff of the ‘Westminster bubble’. Yet the whole point about the Hancock story was its reach went way beyond that bubble, that’s precisely why Tory MPs successfully pressured him to quit.

It wasn’t just the jaw-dropping photos and video of Hancock in a clinch that ensured this story cut through outside SW1 (the test is always whether the WhatsApps of MPs’ non-political friends pick it up and boy did they in spades). It was the simple, rank hypocrisy of the man who set the rules breaking them.

Add in the contrast between his workplace affair and the deadly seriousness of people forced to miss funerals, and this was way bigger than a bit of bubble trouble. The PM sounded like a man who believed the political wound had healed after just four days, but Starmer picked at the scab to reveal what lay beneath.

All those couples whose weddings have been reduced to small events, or whose family and friends have been barred from hugging or dancing at a reception, won’t have seen the Hancock clinch as hilarious. Wrecking your own marriage is a personal car-crash, wrecking thousands of other marriages while snogging your lover is public policy suicide.

The Hancock hypocrisy charge is also attaching to Johnson too. Brides-to-be are furious that the PM can have a garden party to watch the football but they can’t have a proper wedding reception. You can’t sing in church, but you can sing Three Lions in a stadium. You can’t go on holiday, but rich businessmen can arrive from abroad without quarantine.

Johnson’s failure to adapt his PMQs responses will fuel Labour’s charge that his complacency proves the Tories are a tired party that have been in power for too long. But it also risked a total lack of empathy that will worry his MPs more, especially when the PM’s X-factor has been his ability to channel and give voice to voters’ concerns.

And given he already has a reputation for being economical with the actualite (to quote the late Alan Clark), trying to spin his way out of an obvious failure to sack Hancock was ill-advised.

On Tuesday, the SNP’s Ian Blackford got into trouble with the Speaker when he declared: “The truth and this government are distant strangers, and that should come as no surprise when we remember the prime minister has been sacked not once but twice for lying.”

Now it’s demonstrably true that Johnson was fired from the Times for making up a quote and later as a shadow minister for denying he had an affair. So when Speaker Hoyle urged a retraction from Blackford, saying “as we know, hon. Members would never lie”, it’s no wonder the SNP leader in Westminster ignored the plea and carried on regardless.

The other problem for the PM is that he’s now made a habit of using misleading statements in PMQs. Refusing to correct the record over his false claim that Labour voted against an NHS pay rise is one thing. But his consistent misuse of statistics is another entirely. And today there was yet another warning from the statistics watchdog about his statements about child poverty.

As we revealed on Wednesday, the UK Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has written once more to get Johnson to use the right definitions, after he claimed last month that “we are also seeing fewer households now with children in poverty than 10 years ago”. The watchdog pointed out that while this may apply to ‘absolute’ poverty, the figures for relative poverty had got worse.

Most embarrassing to No.10 is that the regulator revealed it had raised this topic privately with the PM’s Downing Street briefing team, and still he kept on making statements that failed to show the full picture. There are clearly lies, damned lies and child poverty statistics.

It may just be down to Johnson’s slapdash nature, or to his failure to shift out of attack mode. Either way, he gives the impression of a PM who just can’t handle the truth. If he’s not careful, over time, the voters may decide on a sacking of their own.