If Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t want people to poke him with sharp sticks, perhaps he shouldn’t leave them lying about the place. If you don’t give them something to poke you with, it spoils the game.
Some of those jagging sticks think the Labour prime minister is too left wing.
Some think he’s a right-winger pretending to be a man of the left. Some think he just doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Some are wounded, grumpy Tory MPs and their biased newspapers.
At least one of them is Rosie Duffield, the Starmer-hating Canterbury MP who won her seat for Labour and, having used her former party to secure her seat, quit weeks later to stand/sulk as an independent (shouldn’t she have to stand in a by-election to see if anyone wants her as their independent MP?).
All this chimes with the feeling that Starmer’s Labour party doesn’t exactly know what it stands for and what it wishes to do with its stonking majority.
Is that fair? Well, Starmer has not exactly been given time to prove himself, and the right-leaning newspapers attacking him have shocking memory holes when it comes to pointing out the sleaze, freebies and political chaos associated with Tories.
Even Boris Johnson, conjuror of untold political chaos and king of the freebie, securer of funds from rich friends and backers to pay for his wedding, holidays and so forth, has tried to claim the moral high ground.
These stumbles are a reminder that politics can easily run off downhill like a careening coach. That’s why the narrative needs shaping so potential cockups and queasy missteps (free spectacles, suits and so on) can be spotted and headed off.
Alastair Campbell, who was Tony Blair’s director of communications, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Labour must make sure a vacuum does not develop which is then filled with stories like the rows over Sue Gray.
What Starmer needs is his own Alastair Campbell, a sharp bruiser and media soothsayer who can read the next day’s headlines.
Sadly, what I didn’t need to read was this headline in the Guardian: “UK may approve bee-killing pesticide despite election promise to ban it.”
Neonicotinoids are banned in the EU because they are toxic to bees – so toxic that one teaspoon of the chemical is said to be enough to kill 1.25 billion honeybees. Yet they have been authorised for use every year in the UK since 2021, thanks to pressure from British Sugar and the National Farmers’ Union.
A spokesperson for Defra said the government had been clear it will change existing policies to ban the use of neonicotinoid pesticides that threaten bees and other vital pollinators. But here comes the qualifier: “Decisions on emergency authorisation applications for use of neonicotinoids on sugar beet for 2025 will be taken in line with legal requirements.”
So they’re going to ban it apart from when they don’t; is that it? As a honey lover this is not good enough for me. I have two jars on the go: a runny honey from a house round the corner, and a fudge-like set honey from a village two or three miles away.
All praise to those bees. We should look after our bees for honey-lovers such as myself. And, more importantly, because bees are one of the most important pollinators for food crops. Without bees, we’d be in a hungry, unsweetened mess.
Look after the bees, Sir Keir. It’s what you promised. Never mind sharp sticks. Watch out for those stings.
At least Starmer rose to the occasion in PMQs this week when a Tory MP asked why he had cancelled Boris Johnson’s 40 new hospital plan.
“Because the promise of 40 new hospitals didn’t involve 40, didn’t involve hospitals, they weren’t new and they weren’t funded.”
As we all know, those ‘hospitals’ existed only in the odd sock drawer of Johnson’s messy mind, where he stores all his worthless promises.