Nick Cohen

You will miss Sir Keir Starmer when he has gone. I hear you say that you will do no such thing. You think that Starmer has been a disaster. He was ‘Two-tier Keir,’ ‘Sir Kid Harmer,’ ‘Free-Gear Keir’ and whatever other insults conservatives generated from their rhyming dictionaries, and that you will be absolutely delighted when he resigns. I hear what you say. But I am afraid I don’t believe you. You will miss him, like addicts miss their fix. The best way to understand Starmer is as a drug. Precisely because he was so mind-numbingly tedious and so terrible at politics, he was the perfect escape from our national decline – Britain’s last diversionary tactic.

The Gorton and Denton by-election gives us a taste of the vicious future that awaits England. The most dynamic force on the left, the Green party, and on the right, Reform, are united in their willingness to replace the old world of Labour and the Tories with sectarian politics. If a right-wing politician behaved like Zack Polanski, the left would be screaming to the very heavens about his breathtaking cynicism and recklessness Before I go any further, I must acknowledge the obvious and say that the collapse of the old parties is their own fault.

Whatever happens in Westminster, it ought to be clear to Labour MPs that Keir Starmer is a political failure. For those on the centre-left (which I accept does not include conservative-minded readers, but bear with me) our non-negotiable political imperative, our reason for getting out of bed in the morning is to stop Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick and the rest of the radical right turning the United Kingdom into a gruesome imitation of Donald Trump’s America. ‘The Labour party is a crusade or it is nothing,’ said Harold Wilson. Under Starmer’s bloodless leadership it is in danger of becoming nothing The failure of Keir Starmer’s government is not therefore just one of the normal vicissitudes of politics we can take on the chin.

In 2008, Maggie Darling, wife of the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, invited journalists to a briefing at 11 Downing Street on the collapse of the global financial system. An appropriately Chekhovian scene awaited us when we reached the first-floor drawing room. Outside the wind was blowing a gale, lashing leaves and branches onto the windowpanes. As it howled, we stood around waiting for the Chancellor – and we kept on waiting. Where was he? What was going on? The level of betrayal is staggering. I have never seen anything like it in British politics. You would have to go back to Kim Philby spying for the Russians to find an equivalent Finally, Darling appeared. ‘Been busy, Chancellor?’ asked my colleague Martin Bright.

If they were from any other minority, no one on the left would have the slightest trouble denouncing the deaths of 53-year-old Adrian Daulby and 66-year-old Melvin Cravitz as the result of a lethal racist attack. A terrorist with the resonant name of Jihad Al-Shamie – talk about nominative determinism – went for them because they were Jews. That’s all there was to it. The assassin, a British citizen of Syrian heritage, showed his appreciation for this country by ramming his car into the grounds of the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in my home city of Manchester and stabbing any Jew he could find. He had never talked to them. He had never discovered their views about Israel and Palestine. It was enough that they were Jews, and any Jew would do.

There is a unique, and bitter, flavour to the corruption of the men of the 1990s. Peter Mandelson – who was yesterday sacked as UK ambassador to Washington – Tony Blair, and the former German and US leaders Gerhard Schroeder and Bill Clinton came from the left, and offered a hard but plausible message to their supporters. The right had monopolised power under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, they said. The only way to win in the late 20th century was for Labour in the UK, the Democrats in the US, and the Social Democrats in Germany to abandon their old notions of standing up to the bosses on behalf of the workers and embrace big business. They called it the “third way”: neither capitalism nor socialism. Frankly, it was just capitalism.

The richest man in the world and, as of 20 January, the most powerful man in the world will be uniting to attack the UK. The outstanding question is: what will the British right do about it? I understand why some conservatives may be tempted to go along with their country’s enemies. I can see how the demands that we must pretend that men can be women and only whites can be racist so outrage them that any enemy of the woke becomes worth supporting. I get it. Really, I do. In my darker moments I feel that same contempt for the worst of the left myself. But conservatives claim to be patriots who love their country. If they mean it, they need to understand that Elon Musk and Donald Trump threaten the UK.

Nigel Farage ought to terrify the Tories. He has terrified them many times over the past decades. But until now, he hasn’t had the force of the US president, the richest man in the world, and the global online right behind him. As the struggle to become the dominant voice on the British right intensifies, Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative party look like yesterday’s news by comparison.  Who is to say Farage cannot supplant the Tories as Trump supplanted the old Republican elite or Marine Le Pen supplanted the Gaullists? The latest example of how rapidly the political weather is changing was Elon Musk’s rant that the ‘people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state’.

A few days ago, in the suburban surroundings of the Phoenix cinema in Finchley, north London, a major film by a great director that positively hums with contemporary relevance received its first, and by the looks of it, only showing in the English-speaking world. Like so many examples of authoritarianism, the censorship is confined to the Anglosphere The Jewish Film Festival finally found the courage that art house cinemas, the BBC, Channel 4, and all the streaming services lacked and put on An Officer and a Spy for one night only. And now it has gone again. Even Amazon Prime does not have it, and it is meant to have everything.

Those of us who voted Labour with pleasure on 4 July could never have imagined the new government’s first 100 days. We thought that the grown-ups would take charge after the chaos of the Tory years. Labour would be the adults in the room, as the cliché goes: sensible, professional people like Sir Keir Starmer, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, and Rachel Reeves, a former analyst at the Bank of England. Conservative readers are fooling themselves if they believe that Labour’s troubles will continue Angela Rayner once described Keir Starmer as ‘the least political person in politics I know,’ and many found his apolitical nature endearing – mature, even. We could not have been more wrong.

For months US Democrats have been wondering why voters were not supporting Joe Biden. He has been a good president, and enacted many worthy reforms. Donald Trump, by contrast, is clearly a dictator in the making. The idea that American voters have elderly relatives and (love them though they do), know that an 81-year-old cannot take on a tough job, let alone stay in post until he is 86, did not seem to occur to them. You are in a fight to save your democracy. You can’t expect others to do your fighting for you Ah, Democrats were saying only this week, Trump is as rambling and senile as Biden. Maybe, but you need a candidate who can beat Trump not match his mental and physical decline.

There is a leftist case against woke ideology. It’s rare to hear it because it flies against many preconceptions and fears. Liberals and leftists are wary for two reasons. Conservatives love to highlight the first: the fear of being cancelled. And just because conservatives love to highlight it, does not mean it is not true. I was at one of London University’s colleges a few days ago. I had better not say which one. The private WhatsApp groups of women academics are full of complaints about the trans movement overturning the gains of feminism. There is a crying need for honesty in this debate Not one academic dared make her thoughts public. Her university, her trade union and her colleagues would either happily denounce her heresies or would not dare to defend them.