Keir Starmer got into politics late in life, but the Reform leader’s been at it for a lifetime, says Fleet Street Fox. The PM needs to learn from him, fast
Winter fuel payments. National insurance increases. Cutting the benefits of the disabled. All of them hard to sell at the best of times, but currently being sold to the voter with the same élan as Del Boy trying to offload alarm clocks that run backwards.
Throw into the mix some u-turns that should have involved screeching brakes and smoking tyres, but have instead become a gentle and deadly drift towards the central reservation, and you have a toxic metaphor cocktail that won’t so much knock anyone’s socks off as gradually remove your shoes, your wallet, and your will to live.
Meanwhile a party so minor it has 14 times FEWER MPs than the Liberal Democrats is romping all over the opinion polls, grabbing all the airwaves, and highlighting all the problems. It’s stealing policies from Left and Right, appealing across the social spectrum and even making Liz Truss reach for her calculator.
The only thing Keir Starmer seems to be worried about is Nigel Farage’s lead in the polls, but his decision to tackle the Reform leader head-on has only made the PM look weak and puffed up his opponent’s importance. As usual, Keir’s doing it wrong. There is an awful lot to learn from Nigel, if you just have a rummage.
1. Nigel is true to his brand. He doesn’t deviate. He doesn’t try to appeal to those who are opposed to him. He just doubles down, does what annoys them harder. It helps that his schtick is being a disruptive posh oik in yellow trousers, a role any idiot can play with insane ease and the right wardrobe. Plus, Britain likes an underdog – an annoying terrier on the ankles of power, a peasant’s revolt, a flick at the nose of greatness. Lovely stuff, off you go Nigel and give ’em one from me.
2. Nigel rules or walks. Through sheer force of personality he’s set up three political parties, and walked out of two of them when his power waned. If he ever gets to lead a Parliamentary group bigger than what can be handled by one end of the saloon bar, he’ll have so many factions, rivalries and headaches he’ll change his pub again. Until then, he’s centre of attention, and the centre of power. Were he ever to be PM, a chief of staff would have to kowtow or hit the road.
3. Nigel has simple targets that don’t cost him anything. Leave the European Union. Brexit or bust. Cut immigration and cut taxes, even if they were both high because of Brexit. Cut the green crap, even if it’s the best way to capitalise on the technological revolution so many of Nigel’s supporters resent. Nigel’s not the first person on earth who’s been able to sell stagnation and self-harm as ‘reform’, but imagine what he could achieve, if only he obeyed the dictionary.
4. Nigel ignores everything. Warnings. Maths.. History. Logic and facts are of as much relevance to the British Sideshow Bob as Fermat’s last theorem has to a duck. If you don’t let anything stop you, then eventually every obstacle disappears, through boredom or erosion or distraction. That this man and the voter are apparently in sync has nothing to do with his everyman charm, because he doesn’t have any. He’s succeeding only because everybody else is flailing, and even the cat has noticed.
The problem for Keir is that he doesn’t have a personal brand, and he’s dropped the Labour one. He deviates, not to disrupt but to appease. There he is, Billy Big Majority, but he’s governing like Theresa May being racked by a hung Parliament.
So he’s announced an expansion of free school meals, a great win for a fantastic Mirror campaign that would have delighted his party if only he’d done it last July. And he could have, as it’s not being paid for by a single penny of fiscal headroom because there isn’t any. Instead, it was rushed out, 10 months into a haphazard premiership, to block questions over the winter fuel u-meander, and in so doing absolutely kiboshed the headlines for a £15bn transport investment Rachel Reeves had announced not 5 minutes earlier.
Two bits of good news have cancelled each other out, and the drumbeat of inevitable tax rises in the autumn to pay for it all has got louder. A win has become a political cost, with his party in despair and the voter barely aware of anything beyond the fact the PM screwed up taking away winter fuel payments and now is screwing up handing them back again. All he had to do was say the richer pensioners must pay for free school meals, and every granny in the country would have had to suck a sweet and put up with it.
Keir is paying attention to everything, so decision-making slows from a crawl to a death-spiral. The one thing Keir ignores is the voter – that shallow coalition of Labour values and middle-class, urban graduates who both loathed the Tories. When the Labour manifesto held nothing of note, everyone assumed there was a grand plan too radical to reveal in full – in truth, the plan was just to not be the Tories. Even that failed, because for the past 300 or so days every Labour minister and spad has not even bothered to butt heads with the Whitehall machine. Computer said no, and politics withered on the spot. It’s not small boats making Nigel stronger: it’s because voting for the other guy made not a jot of difference.
The solution to this is easy. Either Nigel should take over the Labour Party, or Keir has to start acting more like Nigel. For what do we think Nigel would do, if only he had Labour values at heart rather than his own? He’d lead not ask, smash the machine not file a complaint, ghost the politics reporters and go on the edgy podcasts, line up all the cuts first and then bang out the good news and wins, over and over, because someone who SOUNDS like a success IS a success.
He couldn’t do the same for Reform. He grifts rather than works, applies himself only to what pleases, and will ultimately always implode, either through incompetence, insanity, or in a huff. The biggest lesson Starmer can take from Farage is that he, too, has no real policies. Both Reform and its leader are empty vessels, but voters still feel it’s Labour that is hollow. They committed to nothing to get elected, and now are so non-committal that it’s like watching fog thicken. Who’d vote for gruel, when there’s red meat on offer?
Those empty entrails will choke Starmer’s premiership as surely as they will one day envelop Farage. Starmer has to learn, fast, how to bottle Eau de Nigel and leave him spluttering in his wake.