I have spent the past week marvelling at the behaviour of our commentating class. They seem to have whipped themselves back into that familiar frenzy which must lead, inexorably, to the Prime Minister stepping down. ‘He has to go’; ‘The most incompetent prime minister of my lifetime’; ‘Things can’t go on like this’ – these were the general sentiments revolving around Keir Starmer even before his party’s thumping in last week’s local elections.
The problem is that some of us have a long-ish memory. So when people say the Starmer government is uniquely incompetent or ineffectual, a tiny flare goes off in my mind. Have these people forgotten Theresa May? Do they not remember the snap election of 2017 which was meant to deliver a ‘strong and stable government’, but which resulted in this country almost suffering a parliamentary coup enabled by – of all people – John Bercow? Are the people who claim we have never been so badly governed lucky enough to have overlooked the years when Anna Soubry was forever on the airwaves?
When people say Starmer is uniquely incompetent or ineffectual, a tiny flare goes off in my mind
Some of us also remember the Boris Johnson years. In my own view, Johnson ought to have been rinsed for tripling net immigration to the UK after promising that leaving the EU would enable the exact opposite. Instead, Britain spent months becoming acquainted with the investigations and character of Sue Gray. In parliament Starmer spent weeks forensically getting to the bottom of exactly where Johnson was when a cake arrived in the same room as him.
Along the way the media class had multiple ‘he must go’ moments. I remember sitting in the green room of Newsnight when the entire media and parliamentary class was in meltdown because Johnson had dared to use the word ‘humbug’ in reply to a female Labour MP. ‘Were you actually in the House when he used the word?’ one of the presenters asked an MP, as though it was like being present when the Washington Post received the Pentagon Papers or when Harry Truman got the news that the bomb was deliverable.
Once again the ‘never been worse governed/things can’t go on like this’ class got their way. And so the Conservative party membership, in their infinite wisdom, gave us the pleasure of Liz Truss. I suppose recollections may vary, but I for one recall that the prevailing sentiment during those weeks was that we had never been worse governed and that Britain’s problems could only be addressed – once again – by a change of prime minister.
The Rishi Sunak years are close enough in time to speak for themselves. But pray remember that when they were brought to a merciful halt there was also a strong belief that a change of prime minister would once again fix all of our ills.
After Starmer’s election victory, the left and centrist crowd spent some weeks crowing about how the grown-ups were back in the room. ‘Isn’t it nice that things are calm and professional again?’ they said. Now those same people are insisting that we once again need a change of prime minister.
Instead of joining these excitable cries, it seems to me that we would do better to ask: what exactly will be achieved if Starmer is replaced? Where is the bench of talent in the Labour party that will then lead our country? Ed Miliband was roundly rejected as a candidate for prime minister back in 2015, and it is hard to think of a more anti-democratic manoeuvre than the net-zero zealot and destroyer of industries being crowbarred in to address the nation’s woes.
The other candidates? Wes Streeting? Seriously? People think that someone who made his way seamlessly from far-left student politics to parliament and then the cabinet – a man of no outstanding talent – is the man to represent Britain on the world stage? Is this really the answer? How many weeks before people decide otherwise? Nothing will improve in our country if a lacklustre and ineffectual Labour party leader is replaced by someone who couldn’t even beat him to that job.
My point is that none of these swap-eroos of prime ministers led to a better outcome. The problems we need to address far outstrip the abilities of any member of the parliamentary Labour party – or even the King over the Irwell, Andy Burnham – to resolve.
What are those problems? I would throw just a few out there. Our electoral system is meant to avoid continental-style coalition governments. But since 2010 we have been haunted by first-past-the-post plus Italian-style coalition politics. When the public do turn out to deliver a clear verdict (2016, 2019) their reasons for doing so have been roundly ignored. Starmer has shown that again this week by arguing that Britain – stuck in a crevice after trying to Brexit – could solve its issues by crawling back on to the soothing cliff edge of the EU.
In reality we spend beyond our means and borrow more than we can afford. A tiny number of medium- and high-earning tax-payers are expected to endlessly foot the bill for the indigent class and those who have just arrived to take what they can from us. We have a health service which is the envy of the third world but admired by no one who has actually paid for it and is forced to use it. We have an economy which has been flatlining, with a rising left who have decided that the answer to this is to attack the few successful people.
So my own advice to the Labour party and their leader is: ‘Hang on, Sir Keir.’ Give the political right time to get their house in order and then let’s have a nice big election.
New Labour’s anthem was ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. It is surely the insight of any true conservative that the opposite tends to be the case. My own song version might not top the charts as D:Ream’s did, but mine has the benefit of being true. ‘Things Can Always Get Worse.’ I, for one, will be humming this over the days to come.
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