It was clear from the outset that Keir Starmer’s Labour would win the election by default, then prove a fiasco in power. Starmer’s ratings are now worse than Rishi Sunak’s at his nadir, and Nigel Farage’s Reform – a party with just five MPs – appears to be edging ahead of the party of government in the polls. So far, this government has spent its time clobbering pensioners, being showered with freebies by well-heeled donors and damaging economic confidence with ill-judged post-election doom and gloom, followed by a panicked “growth above all else” reverse ferret. Just months after securing power, the prime minister’s own staff briefed two Times journalists that they had no idea what he really believed, and that he wasn’t really running the country – that he’d been deceived into thinking he was “driving the train”, when he’s really been sat at the front of the driverless Docklands Light Railway.
It’s almost enough to make you pity Starmer – imagine publicly humiliating the prime minister you are paid to work for just months after winning power? – until you remember that he appointed this backstabbing rabble in the first place. The published excerpts from Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund’s new book, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, lay out the strategy of this rightwing faction. “Occasionally they even spoke of their leader as if he were a useful idiot,” they write. “Keir acts like an HR manager, not a leader,” his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is quoted as saying. They saw Starmer as a convenient empty vessel, whom they could deceive a Corbynite Labour membership into voting for, then use their yes-man to permanently bury the left before replacing him with a true believer, the ultra-Blairite Wes Streeting. Alas, the Tories managed to implode and the man they see as a useful idiot sits in No 10, pretending to drive a train.
