Keir Starmer isn’t fit to be prime minister
TLabour’s lacklustre election results – and now the revival of beergate – show why he is unlikely to win a majority
Red Wall voters have sussed out his lack of authenticity and inability to communicate clearly
here is no point in pretending that the Conservatives had a good night. They haemorrhaged what little support they had left in London and, even more worryingly, appear to be losing ground in the Tory shires they once called home.
But it was equally delusional for Sir Keir Starmer to suggest that Labour’s local election results were somehow a “turning point”, unless he means more people turning to the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and independents outside the M25.
The way the Labour leader was behaving yesterday morning, you would have thought he was actually on course to win the next general election. If such a vote were held today, it isn’t even clear that he would lead the largest party in Parliament.
As polling guru Sir John Curtice pointed out yesterday morning, while Labour support had increased in the capital – which has now become a red “fiefdom” – it may actually have been “down slightly” in the rest of the country.
“The Labour Party has been wanting to argue throughout the night that these local election results clearly demonstrate evidence of progress,” he told the BBC. “Yes, Labour have certainly made progress as compared with last year,” he added, “but last year was a very poor performance so being four points up on that was not exactly surprising. I think therefore this is certainly not a local election performance that in any sense indicates a party that is on course for winning a general election with an overall majority.”
It should be pointed out that Labour did do relatively well in Wales, and picked up a few wins outside the capital. But it’s pretty clear that Starmer achieved nothing close to the astonishing victory he had made it out to be.
What his lacklustre performance outside the capital actually tells us is that voters don’t think the Leader of the Opposition is really up to the job of prime minister.
That’s a damning indictment after 12 years of Tory rule, especially when the man who presides over the Government is arguably the most divisive politician ever to have graced the despatch box.
The hard reality is that Starmer, having spent the past six months calling for Boris Johnson’s resignation and insisting that Britain “deserves better”, has failed to win the confidence of Red Wall voters. They appear to have sussed out his lack of authenticity and inability to communicate clearly and honestly.
With his self-styled status as the Perfect Peter to Johnson’s Horrid Henry, the MP for Holborn and St Pancras has naturally gone down a storm with the metropolitan elite. The types who want to cancel the “Islamophobic” Biff, Chip and Kipper books, who think that women can have penises, that Winston Churchill was a racist and that freedom of speech only applies to people who share your views. There’s every chance these people live in London and vote Labour.
Similarly, it’s no surprise that middle-class Remainiacs like the former Tory MP Nick Boles voted for Labour this week. Anyone who thought that Brexit voters would be fobbed off by a Norway-style deal that would have seen us tied to Brussels for decades to come would naturally be attracted to the erstwhile Remainer-in-chief. And people like Winchester College and Oxford-educated Mr Boles can afford to vote Labour in places like Wandsworth and Westminster. What do they care if council tax goes up?
But for the silent majority who consider Sir Keir to be more boring than a night discussing “non-binary” with a group of Durham University students, they’re frankly going to be voting for anyone but Labour.
Even if that means voting Lib Dem. That’s how desperate some people have become.
I couldn’t help but laugh at Daisy Cooper’s suggestion that “it is the Liberal Democrats who can defeat the Conservatives and get Boris Johnson out of Downing Street”. The MP for St Albans forgets that many people in the Midlands and the North will never, ever forget the illiberal and undemocratic nature of the party’s attempts to reverse the Brexit referendum result – and rightly so.
If Sir Ed Davey is the answer (bless him), then I think we would all like to know the question. It might well be true that the Lib Dems are good at getting the bins collected, but it is always worth remembering that they were the ones who called for Article 50 to be revoked in their 2019 general election manifesto, and who wanted frequent flyers to be taxed and for cannabis to be legalised. They were fully supportive of HS2 until they cynically pretended they weren’t in the run-up to the Chesham and Amersham by-election.
And those who voted for the Greens, the ultimate protest vote if ever there was one, might want to consider whether they really support a massive rise in foreign aid spending and the creation of a “Ministry for Peace”, as well as a 20mph speed limit and heroin to be available by prescription.
I understand that Home Counties Conservatives are angry about partygate, but they ought to be careful what they wish for.
And on that note, it is rather clear that beergate was also on voters’ minds as they entered polling stations on Thursday. Starmer’s shiftiness over the whole issue has blown a hole in his apparent “authenticity”. With Labour having initially lied about deputy leader Angela Rayner being at the beer-andcurry night, and amid the ongoing confusion over whether or not it was a “work event” or a “party”, the opposition have proved themselves to be just as bad as the Tories with their silly obfuscation. Now they face, like Downing Street, the cloud of a police investigation hanging over their heads for weeks or perhaps months to come.
It might not have been as big an infringement of the Covid rules as Downing Street’s apparent transformation into the Hacienda during lockdown, but the fact that Labour may also have been at it, seemingly meeting up and having a grand old time, rather undermines Starmer’s superiority complex. Who knows, he may even be forced to resign himself.
A dearth of policy ideas is also as big a problem for Starmer as it is for Johnson. Sure, the Tories have run out of steam, but I think the public can probably pinpoint where Johnson stands on Brexit (honour it), the NHS (tax people more to fund it), defence (be Zelensky’s best friend) and education (T Levels, innit?).
Conversely, voters would be hard pushed to name any Labour policies beyond calling for Johnson’s resignation. And possibly a windfall tax on energy companies, which sounds like a great idea until the economists point out it would deter big businesses from investing in Britain and stifle growth as we teeter on the brink of another recession.
Just watch an interview with Starmer for more than a few minutes and you will see that Labour is devoid of anything vaguely interesting to say about anything. Instead, all the front bench seems to do is play some sort of Left-wing nonsense bingo every week, name-dropping food banks and the cost-of-living crisis without actually providing any solutions.
Conservative Campaign Headquarters shouldn’t, however, dismiss the prospect that a quiet collaboration between Labour, the Lib Dems and other smaller parties could cause it serious electoral harm. Word on the ground is that informal pacts did take place to give one party a free run at seats where only one opposition candidate was best placed to beat the Tories.
If he makes it to the next election, Starmer won’t manage to become prime minister on his own accord. But we could be heading for a gruesome hung parliament in 2024 that could see Labour propped up by the Lib Dems and the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon for deputy PM, anyone? Surely that would be the worst of all worlds.