When Boris Johnson won his eighty-seat majority, Labour looked to be destined to spend a decade or so in the political wilderness. But ‘Partygate’, the eventual defenestration of Boris plus the psychodrama of Truss and the fraught first year of Sunak meant that the tables turned. All of a sudden, dreary Keir Starmer – with his cardboard hair and his voice like the recently recreated Aztec death whistle, said to be ‘somewhere between a spooky gust of whistling wind and the scream of a thousand corpses’ – was not the lame duck Kinnockesque caretaker. Labour’s leader became the shoo-in next PM.
Now the numbers seem to be shifting again. A poll this week revealed that Labour’s lead has shrunk to just ten points over the Tories. Sunak’s party now has 29 per cent of the vote share, compared to Labour’s 39 per cent. And I’m starting to wonder: is Starmer actually subconsciously – or maybe even consciously – trying to lose?
Over the last two or three weeks, he has dropped a series of anvils on his own feet and scored several remarkable goals right into the back of his own net.
Starmer has dropped a series of anvils on his own feet
His previous tactic, tried and tested and true, was to sit back and say and do nothing. The Tories disintegrated unaided, without any help from him. We’ve forgotten that Grant Shapps and Michael Gove were slagging off Liz Truss openly just days after she became prime minister. That’s the kind of government any opposition leader dreams of. You don’t have to lift a finger.
But now Starmer keeps interrupting, even though his enemies are still making mistakes. He plans to sign away immigration policy back to the EU. He has announced he will bring in a new ‘Race Equality’ Act to ‘tackle structural racial inequalities’, which is essentially a boondogglers’ charter. This announcement was illustrated with a phenomenally patronising photo of him laying hands on a cheery black gentleman. (We can only be thankful it wasn’t a high-five.) He has also fallen straight into the Tories’ elephant trap by opposing the tiny changes to their insane net zero wheeze, and thus endorsing extra hassle for motorists.
The optics of these things are terrible. It’s as if he’s seen the polling research that suggests the Tories’ new voters of 2019 are disenchanted enough not to vote at all next time round, and thought ‘How can I get them to turn out and vote Conservative again?’ The new party slogan could read ‘Vote Labour – because we’re even worse!’
This is strikingly odd behaviour from someone who has demonstrated clearly that he will say and do literally anything to get power, and then disown whatever he said the instant he can. We saw this in all its glory with the sheer chops of his behaviour in the Labour leadership election campaign, after which he knifed his supposed great mate Corbyn in the front at the first opportunity and dropped his left-wing pledges – ‘based on the moral case for socialism, here is where I stand’ – like Pop Tarts just out of the toaster.
If Starmer was running true to form, he’d now be saying he’d put the Navy in the Channel, ban critical race theory, and keep telling us that of course women don’t have penises. Instead he’s doing crazy things like going after his greatest allies, such as the public schools, who are now churning out obedient ‘progressives’ by the cartload.
Can he really be this daft? There is a sense of him being caught up in the drama, of treating the world as he would prefer it to be rather than how it actually is. But he must surely know the opinion stats on, for example, immigration. Does he have an imp of the perverse, egging him on to chuck his chances?
Or perhaps it’s totally logical. He might think that he would inherit a very iffy-tasting chalice. He might be calculating that the total shuddering collapse of the NHS, for example, would likely happen on his watch. Would it not be better to wait this one out and let the Tories reap that?
Of course, so much could still go wrong with such a plan. It would be unwise for him, or anyone else, to underestimate the Tories capacity for self-destruction: the Chancellor even used party conference to take a pop at the Home Secretary. With a government sabotaging themselves like that just when they have begun, possibly, to turn their fortunes around it might be impossible for Labour to lose. It could be that, however hard he tries, Keir Starmer is destined to be prime minister.
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