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Keir Starmer had the perfect comeback after Dominic Raab tried to correct him during PMQs

Keir Starmer had the perfect comeback after Dominic Raab tried to correct him during PMQs

Keir Starmer used his first PMQs session as Labour leader to ruthlessly quiz Dominic Raab on the government's efforts to step-up testing of coronavirus.

The latest figures show that the government is falling way below their aim of 100,000 tests per day, which they were aiming to hit by the end of April.

At a reported 18,000 test per day, this is nowhere that target and way behind other European countries and Starmer wanted to find out why.

As his first question he asked the first secretary, who is standing in for a recovering Boris Johnson:

The health secretary made a very important commitment to 100,000 tests per day by the end of April but yesterday the figures for actual tests was 18,000 which was down from Monday which was 19,000.

So, we are way behind the curve and the end of the month is a week tomorrow. What does the first secretary expect to happen in the next eight days to get us from 18,000 tests a day to 100,000?

Raab replied by first congratulating Starmer for being elected as Labour leader but chose to then try and correct him for apparently reading the wrong figure out. The Tory minister said:

I do have to correct him. Our capacity is now 40,000 tests a day which is an important milestone.

Starmer noticed what Raab had done and informed him that he didn't need correcting as he had read out the actual figure that had been released.

I didn't need correcting, because I gave the figure for the actual tests a day.

For supporters of the new Labour leader, it marked a confident start to his tenure in the role and held the government to account on the important issue.

At the time of writing the UK has carried out 411,192 tests for Covid-19 with 133,495 of those being confirmed as positive. More than 18,000 people have now died of the virus in the UK.

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