Starmer’s new election-winning makeover
GET A BORIS CUT …AND USE YOUR JOHNSON! Labour strategists tell Starmer he needs to be SCRUFFY-HAIRED SHAGGER to win
UNDERFIRE Keir Starmer needs to scruff- up his hair and “f** k anything that moves” if he wants to replace Boris Johnson as PM, advisers warn.
Labour’s top man suffered a terrible weekend, losing the formerly- safe Labour seat of Hartlepool to the Tories, their first win in the town for almost 50 years.
His party also lost dozens of council seats across the UK.
The Hartlepool result was only the third time in 40 YEARS that a governing party had taken a seat from the Opposition in a mid- term by- election and Labour’s share of the vote went down from the 2019 election when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader.
The result, and the massacre in the council elections, had left wingers soon calling for Starmer’s head and demanding the party move even further towards the left.
Even moderates in the Blairite wing of the party reckon that unless former top prosecutor Starmer pulls a rabbit out of the hat, his days as Leader of the Opposition could be numbered.
But Labour image makers reckon they could have a plan.
Shambles
An insider told Sunday Sport: “What John Prescott called the tectonic plates are moving. Politics is not what it was. We have a PM in power who is a personal and political shambles, who clearly cannot drive a hairbrush and who has a string of children across the capital.
“So the advice to Sir Keir has to be ‘ don’t brush your hair and f** k anything that moves.’ It’s clearly the only way to power.”
Sources close to Sir Keir say he has already dismissed the idea but “has nothing better to suggest.”
The Tory candidate in Hartlepool, Jill Mortimer, who defeated Labour rival Paul Williams by nearly 7,000 votes, hailed the result as a “truly historic” moment.
Key figures on Labour’s left say the party must now change direction.
Diane Abbott, an ally of Sir Keir’s predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, tweeted: “Crushing defeat for Labour in Hartlepool. Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result. Labour won the seat twice under his leadership. Keir Starmer must think again about his strategy.”
Ms Abbott glossed over the fact that her former lover led Labour to its worst electoral defeat since the 1930s.
Labour’s obsession with so- called identity politics has troubled many in their former heartlands.
Dismay
There was dismay when Sir Keir and his deputy Angela Rayner “took the knee” after a black man was killed by cops in America and puzzlement at the party’s obsession with transsexuals.
While the left blamed the defeat on Starmer not being “Corbyn” enough, Blairites blamed Mr Corbyn for the trouncing.
Former Hartlepool MP Lord Mandelson said it was clear from his conversations with voters in the town that Mr Corbyn was “still casting a dark cloud over Labour” and that the party had more work to do to put that era behind it.