When Sir Keir Starmer won his impressive landslide victory, certain commentators took one look and started tutting like a builder called to inspect a hastily erected wall. ‘Nice and high,’ they said. ‘But who dug those foundations? It won’t last. Two sugars, please. And a Jammy Dodger for my friend Nigel.’
Those early purveyors of doom will be rubbing their hands after Labour’s disappointing showing at the local elections.
Before trudging through the troughs, let’s recall The League of Gentlemen, where a ‘local shop for local people’ was run by a woman called Tubbs, who fended off strangers wishing to make a purchase on the grounds that they were not local.
Local elections should be where local people vote on local issues. Reform UK, awash with money from Christopher Harborne, the biggest donor in British political history, took out front-page newspaper ads on election day declaring: “Vote Reform. Get Starmer Out.”
Whether those adverts made a difference would be hard to prove, but they do remind us that Reform UK is an opportunistic wiggler through loopholes. Did many Reform voters actually think their local vote might push Starmer out? Hard to say, but surely some did.
Incidentally, the diminished Observer rose in my estimation last Sunday for a front page about Harborne under the headline: “The man who bought Britain.”
More of that, please. And more investigations into the five million pounds Harborne gave Farage as a seemingly dodgy personal gift (as discussed in the previous MOL).
This morning Starmer gave another of his reset speeches. It was one of his best speeches. But will it make any difference? It’s an unpopular opinion, but I think Labour would be mad to depose Starmer. It would lead to instability for the country – and wouldn’t improve the chances of whoever Labour chose to succeed him.
On some levels, Starmer’s unpopularity seems unreasonable. Is he really worse than Boris Johnson, Theresa May or Liz Truss? He’s not an inspirational politician, it’s true – but is he that awful?
If he is forced out, Labour will look as hopelessly self-serving and panicky as the Tories were when they foisted three prime ministers on us in one year (a three-for-one offer no-one was queuing up to buy).
On the quiet much about life in Britain is improving as the damage done by the Tories is slowly repaired. Are we now such an unreasonable, ungovernable country that we have a massive sulk if everything isn’t perfect in less that two years? Perhaps we are.
This led me to thinking about stories and narratives. Politics is partly about having a story to tell and to sell. Some politicians are better at this than others.
Nigel Farage is a master storyteller, even if the tales he tells are full of lies, exaggerations, thinly disguised racism, blatant self-aggrandisement and impossible promises written on the back of a cigarette packet. His stories are not gripping yarns so much as griping yarns filled with hatred, spite and negativity (incapable as he is of saying anything nice about anyone, other than Donald Trump).
Starmer hardly ever tells a story, apart from the one about his father being a toolmaker. Without a story, or seemingly a coherent philosophy, he struggles to inspire voters. This was apparent soon after he was elected. Instead of brandishing his impressive majority, he tutted along and said, ‘Yes, the foundations do look questionable.’
That majority should have made him confident and full of political vim. He should have taken Reform UK on instead of trying to copy them; he should have been more ecological to deflect the reborn Greens. Instead he turned managerial and cautious.
Talking of storytelling, the media are demon writers of the Westminster soap opera. They workshopped this plotline ages ago, endlessly saying that the local elections were the latest or possibly last cliffhanger for Starmer. Did such coverage affect how people voted? A better storyteller than Starmer might have headed off those pesky scriptwriters. I’d like to think he still could, but I’m not putting money on it.
Despite all the pro-Reform coverage, Nigel Farage’s limited company (it’s not really a political party at all) now has about 5% of the country’s councillors, with Labour having 31%. Thanks to Alex Perkins, former Lib-Dem leader of Canterbury City Council, for the figures and pie chart, taken from Threads.
Yes, Reform has upended the old politics, but will the unbearable cockiness of Nigel Farage really take him to Downing Street? With all my old heart I hope not.