No need to Labour it

Competence: A boring but sure KO for Johnson

THEY are getting itchy over at Labour and it’s not just the heat.

Overall, people are pleased with how things are going.

The prevailing mood is – slow progress but about right for the distance from the General Election.

But the odd worrier points out there are other elections before then and a direction of travel would be nice.

One staffer told me: “People are thinking that just showing we are now a competent outfit is going to be enough. I don’t think it is.”

Gaffe

Our discussion was cut short because the cricket came back on and people have, quite rightly, rearranged their priorities for the summer.

But it nagged at me during the afternoon session. Is that Keir Starmer’s strategy? To have no strategy but just to appear that you know what you’re doing while your opponent unravels.

It’s a sort of Zen approach to winning power, Sir Keir cross-legged in a saffron robe while all around him is chaos.

And it might even work.

When you look at what’s going wrong round the world, maybe a bit of peace and quiet and someone in charge who seems professional would be quite nice.

In America, for example, there is panic about Donald Trump’s election planning. Trump’s latest gaffe, by the way, was to rebrand Thailand as “Thighland” which sounds like a Weight Watchers spin-off.

A friend called me from Washington this week and they are getting seriously worried. “Someone has told him that later this year he’s going to have to fight an election.”

What’s the matter with that?

“You don’t understand. He’s actually fighting it. Like, fighting the election itself. He thinks he’s in a contest against the actual election. Not Biden. That’s why he’s trying to get it delayed.” It’s true. But worse, lawyers are already – and terrifyingly – working out a way to get Trump out of the White House if he won’t leave when he gets beat.

It’s an i ncredible prospect. A beaten president clinging on like Swampy to his tree.

It’s not much better round here.

A Tory MP arrested on suspicion of rape, new government planning proposals that had the fortuitous side effect of making a lot of Conservative donors happier and richer, and Dominic Cummings’s holiday resurfacing.

It is trouble for the Government, no matter how hard they try to shrug it off.

Mr Cummings’s 300 mile mercy dash/holiday/ eye test is damaging, and he is a cut over the eye for the Opposition to keep flicking the jab at.

Researchers claim there has been no recovery from the “Cummings effect” – which they call the loss of trust in the Government since his trip.

So maybe Labour’s doing nothing now is no bad thing. Sit by a river long enough, as the saying goes, and the body of your enemy will float past.

Although there is another adage: “There are many ways of going forward but only one way of standing still.”

It sounds like something Kennedy would have said. Or FDR. Although I’m going to have to go and check because I’ve a nagging suspicion it could have been Eddie the Eagle.