It’s a measure of how weird the past few years in British politics have been that Keir Starmer’s claim that his Labour predecessor would have made a better prime minister than Boris Johnson has received so much coverage. Starmer made the comment during last night’s Question Time programme. It was a line that got blurted out under some pressure and it was a mistake.
The public evidently did not think Corbyn would have made a better prime minister than Johnson
Starmer has initially said he had never really believed that Labour was going to win in 2019, but that he campaigned for the party. This would have held, had he not said during the campaign five years ago that Corbyn would make a ‘great’ prime minister. How do you walk back from that? You either say you were lying, or that you believed your own improbable assertion. The public thinks that politicians are all liars anyway, but admitting to being so is very much taboo.
The problem with the line Starmer used last night – ‘He would be a better prime minister… look what we got, Boris Johnson, a man who made massive promises, didn’t keep them, and then had to leave parliament in disgrace‘ – is that it is a misreading of what the public thought back in 2019. Starmer isn’t the only one to misinterpret that election result. Die-hard fans of Boris Johnson never accept that at least some of his majority was down to public not electing someone who had presided over institutional anti-Semitism in his party, and who almost unfailing took the opposing side to Britain’s security interests whether on the nuclear deterrent or the response to the Salisbury poisonings. Under those circumstances, it would have been frankly embarrassing had Johnson secured a smaller majority.
The public evidently did not think Corbyn would have made a better prime minister than Johnson, and had to live with the consequences of electing a leader who was just the least unsuitable of the two. By being unable to reflect that decision properly, Starmer gave the impression that he didn’t understand quite how bad a leader Corbyn was.
I suspect, though, that he does in fact know that very well, but his own tactics in 2019 have left him in a bind where to be honest about his thoughts then would be to admit to being a liar. His reticence throughout this campaign on almost every topic is in part a reaction to saying the wrong things early on, before becoming leader.
The one comfort that Starmer can take is that the Conservatives took the decision at the start of this election campaign not to make their central attack ‘you backed Corbyn so how can we believe anything you say now’. They clearly felt the electorate had moved on from Corbyn, which they have, but they have not moved on from the question of whether they like and trust Starmer. Last night he showed that this is still his greatest weakness, but the dysfunctional Tory campaign has made that weakness a great deal easier to bear than it should have been.
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