When you’re 15 points ahead in the polls with the local elections just two days away, some might argue that it is best to keep quiet. Especially if you haven’t really got much new to say. Why rock the boat when you’ve got a comfortable lead? No need to go for another goal when you’re five-nil up with only added time to play. Just keep it safe, bank the win and save your resources for more important games to come. Don’t give the Tory party chair, Greg Hands, an excuse to fire off another desperate tweet about Labour having spent all the money.
Keir Starmer saw it rather differently. He had chosen to do a morning tour of the BBC studios. A last-chance power drive to remind everyone of what was at stake this week. Only he didn’t really appear to have given it much thought, as his only consistent message was that everyone was more broke than they had ever been. Almost as though he had imagined that just saying the same thing over and over again would get him through any 15-minute interview.
But sometimes the truth is not enough. You need an argument. A direction. Passion. And by the time Starmer had got to the Today programme, he appeared somewhat lost. As if he’d forgotten what he was doing and why he was on the radio. He would start sentences without having any clear idea how they would end. Somehow or other he managed to talk more about the things he wasn’t going to do, without giving a look-in to anything he would be doing.
It was far from a car crash. But it did feel like a misstep. With the Tory government seemingly out of any ideas for dealing with the cost of living crisis – or much else for that matter – the door is open for opposition parties to stake a claim on the country’s imagination.
The situation cried out for Starmer to take control, to make voters believe there was an alternative to the managed decline of Tory miserabilism. But the Labour leader was nervy. Diffident. Defensive. His affect curiously downbeat. Almost as if his replies had been written by a terminally depressed AI chatbot.
In the absence of any clear direction from Starmer, the BBC’s Justin Webb chose to bend the interview to his own will by focusing on stories in the morning papers. It had been reported that Labour was now planning to go back on its promise to abolish university tuition fees. Was this yet another promise that had bitten the dust?
Starmer sounded startled. As if he hadn’t expected to be asked about a news story in which he featured. It was like this: tuition fees were obviously unfair, but he would now be looking for a way of funding students that was more fair but which didn’t involve abolishing tuition fees.
Was that clear? Er, yeah but no but yeah but no. The economy had moved on, so he would be moving on to something that he couldn’t yet talk about as it was all top secret and he basically hadn’t had time to give it a moment’s thought. He couldn’t say fairer or unfairer than that. Tuition fees would be both going and staying. Politics in a quantum universe. Schrödinger’s students. Maybe they too would be both here and not here.
Webb was understandably confused. So he pressed on. How about the promise to still tax the top 5% of earners more? And to increase the rate of capital gains? Did they still stand? Yes and no. Or rather they had both fallen into a black hole in deep space.
Of course, those with the broadest shoulders should pay more, Starmer mumbled. It was just that the top 5% no longer had broad shoulders. Most of them were near-broke. So it would no longer be right to tax them more. It was time for the country to think of the destitution in which Rishi Sunak now lived. The high-tax, low-growth economic model was broken. Though he wouldn’t necessarily be reducing any taxes. Just not putting them up. So it wasn’t clear just how broken the system was.
Um … My mother was a nurse and my father was a toolmaker, Starmer reminded himself – the rest of us need no reminding – before adding: our phone was once off. Could we talk about that and the cost of living, the Labour leader asked. We couldn’t. Webb was having way too much fun. He wanted to pin down Keir on tax. Did he really think the very rich could not afford more in tax? After all, some appeared to have done very well for themselves in the past 13 years with asset prices rising.
Starmer again started mumbling. Borderline incoherent. He was going to grow the economy. How? By growing it. Top secret. If he told us how, he’d have to kill us. Mmm. If it was that straightforward, it’s a mystery why no one’s thought of it before. And yes, but could we stop talking about the pledges he wasn’t going to keep but focus on the ones he was?
Besides, he had only made those promises to get elected as Labour leader. Now that he was hoping to become prime minister, he had to jettison anything that might scare off floating voters. In any case, how come he got a hard time for breaking promises when Rish! did it the whole time and no one batted an eyelid.
What Starmer longed to say was people just expected the Tories to lie to them, while pundits went mad if Labour did the same. Just give him a break. If he needed to be more Tony Blair than Tony Blair to get elected, then that’s what he’d do. Judge him on what he did in power. Not what he said in opposition. But those words died on his lips.
Hell, people had short memories. The Conservatives had even forgotten that Sue Gray didn’t think the Abba party was worth mentioning. Despite the sex, lies, videotapes and puke, her report had been almost a cover-up. So much for her being a Labour stooge.
