Boris Johnson tried to call Keir Starmer's figures 'misleading' without realising they're his own stats

It wasn’t a very good day for Boris Johnson during Prime Minister’s Question time on Wednesday.

First, he tried to claim there wasn’t a “single country in the world that has a contact-tracing app”, to which Keir Starmer coolly responded:

Germany. 12 million downloads. I checked that overnight.

Then Johnson tried to call out the opposition leader for presenting “misleading” facts, without knowing he was calling out his own government’s stats.

It all started when Starmer got up in the House of Commons and said:

The latest figures from yesterday’s press conference hosted by the Prime Minister show that 33,000 people are estimated to have Covid-19 in England.

The latest track, trace and isolate figures show that just over 10,000 people with Covid-19 were reached and asked to provide contact details.

I do recognise the hard work that has gone into this, but if two-thirds of those with Covid-19 are not being reached and asked to provide contact details, there’s a big problem, isn’t there?

Johnson denied it was a problem and said Starmer was actually “stunned by the success of the Test and Trace operation”.

But when Starmer called the PM to task about “closing the gap between the number of people with Covid-19 and those going into the system”, Johnson claimed:

He’s misleading on the key point. The number of people with Covid, of course, is an estimate in this country… he’s inadvertently giving a false impression of what test and trace is doing.

Starmer then got up once more to refute the claim he was trying to “mislead”:

The figures I gave that the prime minister says are inadvertently misleading are the slides at his press conference yesterday and the slide at the government’s press conference last week – the latest figures.

Johnson shook his head disapprovingly, but the damage was already done.

People took to social media to express their satisfaction over Starmer’s handling of the exchange:

Watch the full exchange below:

BURN!