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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Isabel Hardman and I'm joined today by James Forsyth and Katie Balls.

Well James, we've just come from Prime Minister's questions this

afternoon. How did it go between Boris Johnson and Keir Stama? I think it was Keir Stama's most

effective parliamentary performance in some time. He not only picked the right topic, which was

Nurses' pay, where the government obviously have a vulnerability, but he also asked short, piffy

questions. At PMQ's Boris Johnson's

often rather like a just a minute contestant. If he can find any link to talk about something else other

than what Keir Stama has asked him, he will go for it. Kier Stama kept his questions short enough this

time round that Boris Johnson couldn't turn this conversation to other topics in the way that he

normally does at

PMQ's. And I thought that was good. I also thought the story was sensible. He only had one

joke in this session. And the point is, humour, sadly, just does not work in this empty social

distance chamber. There just aren't enough people for it. And so the jokes fall flat, even if they're

good jokes. This time around, only had one joke which was sensible

and he kept coming back to this point about the 1% pay rise for nurses. I think that they were on a

difficult political place at the moment. Government are comfortably ahead in the polls. I think from

Starmer's point of view, he will be quite happy to ride this issue of nurses pay between now and the

elections in May. If the government will

continue to kind of hide behind the defence, well, look, the independent pay review body is going to

look at this, but it just still allows Labour to keep attacking the government. And I mean,

...