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Phrases we're going to have to get used to: "My mother was a nurse" and "the mask is slipping".

Sir Keir Starmer told us about his mum's chosen career at Prime Minister's Questions this week and again at his national elections campaign launch 24 hours later.

The mask slipping got its first outing in the Labour leader's response to Chancellor Rishi Sunak's budget last week, then was repeated at PMQs and again at the campaign launch.

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Now, forgive the mixing of sporting metaphors, but while Sir Keir has struggled to land blows on Boris Johnson during the COVID vaccination programme, the 1% pay offer to nurses has handed him an open goal.

You're probably thinking that your local council, mayor or police commissioner - let alone the Scottish Parliament or Welsh Senedd - isn't responsible for how much nurses in England get paid.

And you'd be right.

But what Sir Keir is aiming for on "super Thursday" on 6 May, when almost 40 million people have the chance to vote, is a massive protest vote against the government.

The danger with this strategy, of course, is that the prime minister will do a U-turn and promise the nurses a bigger pay rise before we go the COVID-secure polling stations - with our own pens and pencils - eight weeks today.

"U-turn if you want to, the lady's not for turning," Margaret Thatcher famously declared in her speech at the 1980 Conservative Party conference.

The current prime minister, on the other hand, is a serial U-turner, with abrupt about turns on free school meals, opening and closing schools during the pandemic, exams and face masks, to name but a few.

And moving on to motoring metaphors, Mr Johnson applied a screeching of the brakes in preparation for a U-turn on nurses' pay during his answers to Sir Keir during PMQs.

"Of course, we will look at what the independent pay review body has to say, exceptionally, about the nursing profession, whom we particularly value,' he told MPs.

"It is very important that the public sector pay review body should come back with its proposals and we will, of course, study them."

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In other words, it sounds like he's desperately hoping that the review body will come back with a bigger offer, possibly - as the prime minister suggested - making an exception for nurses.

It's also entirely possible that the government will lean on the review body to speed up its deliberations so that it reports back to ministers well before 6 May.

Another Johnson trait that Labour hopes to exploit in the weeks ahead is that as well as being a serial U-turner, he's starting to look like a serial teller of porkie pies at PMQs.

On Wednesday, he claimed Labour had voted against a bigger pay rise for nurses last year when MPs debated the NHS Funding Bill, which enshrined an extra £33.9bn of funding in law.

No they didn't, snapped an angry Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, at the end of PMQs. He had said during the bill's debate that Labour wouldn't vote against it, he told MPs.

Later, the prime minister's new press secretary, Allegra Stratton, refused 20 times at the daily briefing for political correspondents to admit that he made a false claim.

That would have been box office viewing had Ms Stratton - hired to front White House-style televised briefings - been on camera in the new £2.6m Downing Street TV studio that's currently gathering dust.

This row has now escalated with the House of Commons Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, angrily telling the prime minister he needs to set the record straight.

And the feisty Mr Ashworth has accused Mr Johnson of breaking the ministerial code on "giving accurate and truthful information to parliament".

It seems like the prime minister is prolonging an unnecessary row here by refusing to back down.

The latest claim from the defiant Ms Stratton and the Leader of the Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is that Labour MPs voted against the Queen's Speech and therefore they're bang to rights. Hmm. Not very convincing.

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Meanwhile, another row, over a claim by Mr Johnson at PMQs three weeks ago that funding for rail services in the north of England had gone up, when it has actually been cut, has still - so to speak - hit the buffers.

Sir Keir, no doubt attempting to manage expectations, says Labour has a long way to go to make gains on 6 May.

He is pinning his hopes on public backing for his campaign on NHS pay. The polls suggests voters do back the nurses.

But against that, as well as a possible pay climbdown by the government before polling day, if the opinion polls are correct the Tories can look forward to a "vaccine bounce".

And there may not be much that Sir Keir, for all his hope of a protest vote - and talk about his mother and masks slipping - can do about that.