Kelly’s Eye

ONE of the benefits of knocking around for a while is the opportunity it provides for comparing a recurring phenomenon with its previous manifestations. So when the accusatory cry of “Tory sleaze” goes up once more, I’m transported back to the early 1990s.And I can tell you the analogies are far from exact.

I worked then for a newspaper with Labour editorial sympathies, alongside Alastair Campbell, though he was soon to depart for a job with the next Leader of the Opposition,Tony Blair. But, at the time I’m writing about, that post was filled by John Smith.

Smith was held in far higher public regard than Keir Starmer is now, and the sheer absurdity of trying to imagine him taking the knee for something like Black Lives Matter is only part of the reason why.

It helped, too, that Smith was up against John Major, a PM by then fatally discredited by the debacle of Britain crashing out of the ERM. The voters never forgave him for it, and the opinion polls reflected that long before Blair came along and put rocket boosters on them.

Major compounded his woes with his disastrous Back to Basics campaign, which was perceived as a call for a return to a stricter morality – and was inevitably followed by numerous Tory ministers and MPs being exposed for having affairs.

Given just his track record that we know of, Boris Johnson might once have been one of those casualties. But, as I wrote here recently, today’s voters long ago factored in his personal life to their intentions, and concluded that it’s not as if he pursues it while hypocritically preaching higher standards of behaviour for others.

None of this means that Johnson is anything like invulnerable.The political weather can appear to be set indefinitely, and then change with frightening speed. But the Labour party has never been so far removed from the majority’s day-to-day concerns in my lifetime. That’s why today’s cries of “Tory sleaze” so far fall on deaf ears.