Keir Starmer and Liz Truss have one thing in common. If either of them sought a political motto, they could both use the same one: ‘It shouldn’t have been like this.’ Following on from that, there is a further similarity. Neither is prepared to accept responsibility, and take the blame, for the resulting degringolade.
Sir Stumbler now tells us that the country is at a fork in the road, facing a choice: him or Reform. This is a dangerous strategy. Conventional political wisdom is clear on one point: it is unwise to mention your opponent in such a way as to boost his standing. Nigel Farage is delighted with all the attention. If the Prime Minister wants to claim that he is a threat, Farage will cheer him on, and there is a problem. Farage does not seem threatening.
Occasionally, and almost always unsuccessfully, I would offer a line or a theme for a Margaret Thatcher speech. I once suggested that she should compare and contrast her and Neil Kinnock as next-door neighbours. Obviously, the comparison would be unfavourable to the Kinnocks, who could never match the Thatchers’ immaculate household. ‘But that’s terrible, Bruce. You’re saying that I’d be a bad neighbour.’ ‘No, Prime Minister, I’m merely saying that the average voter does not want the bloke next door to run the country.’ She did not use it.
Now we are in a different age, and there is another bloke, ordering another G and T in the Dog and Duck, expounding his views vigorously and amusingly, with no concessions to political correctness. Most of his mates down the pub agree that Nige talks a lot of sense. He wants to do something about immigration – unlike the others. This plan to have an exchange with the French: what does that amount to? We need to keep them out, simple as that. As for Farage being a threat, so he is, to illegal immigrants. and a jolly good thing to. And as for Starmer’s fork in the road, so there is, and he wants the country to take the wrong one.
Instead of trying to demonise Farage, Starmer ought to have tried to patronise him. Do you really want the bloke on the next bar-stool to run the country?
So apart from miscalculation, what is the Prime Minister’s fork all about? To find the answer, I suspect that we have to probe into the man’s political psyche. He had a difficult childhood, with an invalid mother, a disabled brother and a ‘complicated’ father. That is not an upbringing which leads to happiness in one’s own skin. The young Starmer seems to have concluded that life was unfair to people like his family, who were looked down on and undervalued. His own subsequent success, academically and professionally, does not seem to have assuaged his sense of grievance and indeed self-pity.
He was also sustained by a belief that people like him on the Left could rely on a psephological phalanx behind them. Hence his constant references to working people and their families. Indeed, there is an echo of the Bennite slogan from the 1970s: ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’. Needless to say, there is never any acknowledgement of one such a shift which actually occurred: the sale of council houses under Margaret Thatcher. But Starmer assumed that he could rely on the workers.
This would be reinforced by a dual political strategy. First, Labour leaders can only win elections if enough of the middle classes do not regard them as a threat. That was true of Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and above all Tony Blair. The second is to persuade enough voters that the new Labour leadership was offering benign change while the Tories were exhausted failures. That was Wilson’s playbook in 1964: 13 wasted years to be replaced by the white heat of technology. The historical record was false, the white heat was meretricious – but electorally, it worked.
With the help of Tory political ineptitude, Starmer tried the same approach, and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. But success came at a price. Starmer’s party swept to an impregnable majority and assumed that it could now advance on a transformative agenda. Starmer himself would probably have agreed, if he had known what that agenda was. But he had realised, like other Labour leaders before him, that in his party, policy-making led to punch-ups. So leave the punch ups to the Tories, and for policies substitute platitudes.
That is fine, until you arrive in government, and then there was a further self-inflicted wound. In trying to rubbish the Tories’ record, Rachel Reeves succeeded – in spooking the markets. In reality, the outgoing government was presiding over a slow post-Covid and Putin recovery. But the new Chancellor insisted that there was a £22 billion black hole. Jeremy Hunt, her predecessor, destroyed her case. It became clear that the only hole was a grey one, in Rachel Reeves’s CV. Yet the markets were bound to ask themselves a question: if the Government was in a panic about the fiscal position, and therefore seemed likely to impose higher taxes, was this a time to invest in Britain? Between them, Sir Stumbler and the Chancellor with the creative CV had managed to undermine the growth strategy, such as it ever was.
In one respect, Starmer has had a good conference. He saw off a threat. Last week, untainted by the failures of this government, Andy Burnham was on manoeuvres. Inevitably, there were questions. Burnham was likeable. He was good at cheering people up, when they desperately needed cheering up. One might almost say that he was the Labour Party’s equivalent of Farage in that sense. Yet doubts were expressed. Was he enough of a heavyweight for the heights of leadership? Those doubts have now been resolved, and not in Andy Burnham’s favour.
So Starmer will be able to stumble on, with diminished rumbles from Manchester. But there is still no sign that he will be able to win back the Labour defectors from the Red Wall, the old-fashioned working classes whom Labour used to rely on. To woo them, the Labour leader will have to face the fight over forks with Farage, and a key battleground will be immigration; who can do more to reduce it. That is not a contest which the former human rights lawyer will enjoy – or win.
