THREAD/
The media seems dazzled by @Keir_Starmer's Q about government guidance on care homes in today's #PMQs - perhaps because anyone seems brilliant after the previous LOTO. But Starmer's question involved the sort of selectivity you would expect from a sharp lawyer 1/

The guidance in Q was published on 25 February 2020. The passage Starmer referred to is below 2/

Two points are clear:
First, the guidance was explicitly on there being no community transmission of #Covid19UK
Second, the advice about the likelihood of ppl in care homes being infected was explicitly based on that premise (hence "therefore") 3/

On 5 March 2020, @CMO_England indicated that community transmission was now occurring. Thus the express premise for the guidance about infections within care homes was no longer valid 4/ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51749352

Keir Starmer is no fool: he knows fully well that the guidance he referred to was qualified. But, by not mentioning the qualification, he was able to make the PM look like a fool. So he did not mention it and the PM obliged 5/

If a barrister pulled such a trick in Court, they would (rightly) be ticked off by the judge for being unfair. Happily for Starmer, and as he doubtless calculated, the majority of the media does not have the acuity of a decent judge. And so the media duly obliged him too END/

ps: the fairer Q for Starmer to have put would have been why it took HMG 8 days to w/d its guidance once it had been invalidated by the fact of community transmission of #COVID19. The answer is probably that @DHSCgovuk was overwhelmed by the pace at which the crisis developed