Keir’s big moment doomed from start
HOW MUCH of the past seven days have YOU spent queuing for fuel? And, as you’ve sat there quietly fuming have you – like me – had thoughts of this government, a brewery and an inability to stage a party?
Thought as much. If you thought the government were flat footed over their tardy response to the growing Covid crisis, this shambles makes them look like they were as graceful as the
Royal Ballet 18 months ago.
The questions thrown up by this fiasco are endless.
Why didn’t the government act when they learnt around 43,000 possible HGV drivers hadn’t taken to the road as they’d not been able to take their tests during the pandemic?
How come 54,000 HGV driver applications are stuck in a log jam at what appears to be the increasingly incompetent DVLA?
What is the excuse that after days of talking about it, the military has still not been deployed?
Who do they think they’re kidding when they pretend the crisis is easing? It palpably is not. They talk of “levelling up”. Is there any chance we could “fill up” first?
ADMITTEDLY, it would have been nigh on impossible to have done worse. The last time the Labour party and its faithful gathered for their annual conference they were saddled with financially illiterate policies, a powerful group holding sway that were obsessed with class war, a party that seemed to be laying out the welcome mat to anti-semites and a leader who seemed more inclined to lead a protest group than a possible government.
Roll on two years – and remembering the pandemic put an end to any chance of a meaningful get together last year – and it was “party conference” time again last week. The task facing leader Sir Keir Starmer was as straightforward as it was stark: to smooth over the rancorous differences that have dogged the party since the last general election, which saw them turn in their worst performance for nearly 80 years, and put on display a party that looked fit to govern.
It didn’t start well. Before the proceedings even began, somehow the party had managed to get bogged down in a row over cervixes and “scum.”
Even as you read those words, it seems incredible to recall how they managed to shoot themselves in the foot so rapidly.
Sir Keir’s politically correct stance over how it is somehow transphobic to suggest only women have a cervix needs to be filed alongside his urgency to “take the knee” last year, and will have countless voters look on in bewilderment.
The man who should have been talking about the future of the nation found himself skewered and babbling on as if he were discussing an LGBT+ rally over a North London dinner party.
As if that wasn’t damaging enough, his mouthy deputy Angela Rayner detonated her own grenade and lobbed it neatly into the conference with her comments on the Conservatives. They were “a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile... banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian... piece of scum”.
Labour is desperate to lure back the millions who have turned their backs on them and gone to the Tories – from Hull to Hastings. Telling them they voted for “homophobic, racist, misogynistic...scum” is most definitely not the way to achieve that.
Staring his troops in the eyes, Sir Keir knew he had to try and draw the proverbial line under those ructions with his leader’s speech.
How did he fare? Well, on the downside, he became the first Labour leader to be heckled by the Left of the party since Neil Kinnock in 1985. But on the upside, much of that jeering was controlled by a hall largely buying into what he said.
It was only as the stands were taken down, the balloons deflated and the delegates trudged home that some of the holes in the speech emerged.
For instance, many of the bullets the Labour leader fired were, justifiably, aimed at the Government’s incompetence in handling the Covid pandemic.
From problems with the NHS to a bungled education policy and the impact on jobs, it all rang true... until you remember he failed to oppose almost every policy at the time and was found wanting when quizzed over precisely what he would do.
There was also his misty-eyed enthusiasm for a “Good Society” and his insistence he wanted it for all of us.
Who would argue against better education, respect for law and order and wellpaying jobs. This felt embarrassingly like a re-hash of David Cameron’s Big Society.
Yet the response was warm and enthusiastic and it does feel like the latest attempt at excising the hard Left is well under way.
But that was a supportive audience willing him to win. Making Brighton rock is one thing. Convincing an entire nation is far more challenging.
WHILE regrettably there has been no shortage of crises, the latest to engulf New Scotlandyard must be viewed as the most damning imaginable.
Noting an inquiry is to be held, the depraved and unutterably vile ex-met officer Wayne Couzens – who was jailed for life last week for the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard – was reported for two incidents of
“flashing” at a burger restaurant in South London just three days before he committed his unspeakable crime.
Why on earth was he not suspended instantly?
One conclusion has to be that one or more fellow officers may have chosen to protect a fellow cop and not to take the appropriate action.
And if that is true, they must forever live with their culpability.
THERE is a delicious irony in the fact Tony Blair’s son is reported to have made a paper fortune of around £160million by ignoring his Dad’s advice.
Euan Blair, 37, the eldest of the former PM’S sons, has a stake in Multiverse, which is specifically set up to assist people into apprenticeships and away from university courses – a dream that was endlessly pursued by Blair senior as PM.
If only Blair junior was well versed in “weapons of mass destruction”.