Keir Starmer is floundering, and no cabinet reshuffle can save him

Starmer's missteps have plunged Labour's poll performance, leaving him with little to show for his year as leader.

Source - Daily Telegraph - 29/03/21

Link

PATRICK O'FLYNN

Sometimes in politics it is convenient for a leader to retain an under-performing colleague in a senior position to act as a lightning conductor for criticism when things don’t go well. One thinks, for instance, of Boris Johnson’s decision to keep Gavin Williamson as Education Secretary during last summer’s debacle over exams - a fiasco that was caused at least in part by the PM’s own dithering and late decision-making. It worked a treat, with Williamson being compared to Frank Spencer of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ’Em fame and zero headlines about bungling Boris.

But when the whole team is floundering then the steely gaze of the electorate inevitably alights upon the captain - and that is what is happening to Keir Starmer right now. Starmer’s inner-circle briefing that he will shortly sack the beleaguered shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds hardly helps matters when shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds has just been brutally taken apart in the Commons - as he was last week by Home Secretary Priti Patel during one-sided exchanges about reforming the asylum system. Or when Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner has failed to generate any sense of wisdom or authority, but just spits out witless boilerplate abuse at her Tory foes like some superannuated bad girl at the back of the school bus.

Everyone can see that Starmer himself is making misstep after misstep – appearing to side with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex against the Queen, flip-flopping over law and order legislation and looking around for a fence to sit on over matters such as the need to safeguard freedom of speech and inquiry against the Batley Islamists.

When hard Left MPs in the Socialist Campaign group, such as Nadia Whittome, refuse to condemn attacks on the police, no action to put her outside the Parliamentary Labour Party follows. When the reaction of Claudia Webbe, currently suspended from the PLP, to the Bristol riots is an analysis about police brutality being “the boot of a capitalist state” so crude that it would shame a sixth-form Leftist, there is no move to permanently expel her. When Clive Lewis MP whips up a left-wing outcry about Starmer trying to rehabilitate the Union Flag in Labour circles, Starmer relegates the flag rather than Mr Lewis.

The cumulative impact of all this weakness on Starmer’s personal standing has been horrendous. YouGov’s monthly tracker of his net ratings tells the story: +16 in November, +5 in December, level pegging in January, -6 in February and -13 in March. Few things have gone south at such a relentless pace since Amundsen beat Scott in Antarctica. In such a context, inviting the hapless Ms Dodds to perform a Captain Oates impersonation is rather missing the point.

It is the whole team that is failing. Over the last couple of months, Labour’s poll rating has plummeted from level-pegging with the Tories in the polls to an average of around eight points behind. The Tories are preferred by the electorate in almost every policy area – from the economy to law and order, from immigration to Europe. And crucially now on the battle against Covid too.

Certainly, a lot of the change of fortunes is tied up with Britain’s brilliant vaccine roll-out and the EU’s disastrous one. But that a single issue should transform things to this extent also highlights Starmer’s failure to generate any sustainable sense of why voters should back his Labour Party. When everything seemed to be going wrong for the Government, the Labour leader baked himself a soufflé of support that has promptly collapsed.

Labour now has a giant set of elections on the horizon that mark the start of parliamentary mid-term – a moment that ought to be accompanied by deepening unpopularity for the governing party and at least the feeling that the main party of opposition is on a roll. Yet, aside from a likely landslide victory for Sadiq Khan in the London mayoral race, expectations for Labour’s showing are dire. That Khan, an identikit identity politics merchant, is set to be the Labour poster boy this Spring hardly helps a party that is looking to rebuild support in socially conservative “Red Wall” towns lost to the Tories in December 2019.

Should Labour fail to win the parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool – somewhere it defended successfully even in the midst of that Tory landslide – then the idea that Starmer has made any impact at all in a debut year dominated by the Government making highly visible mistakes as it battled the worst peacetime crisis in living memory will be kaput. Even were Labour to limp home with a reduced majority the same impression of zero progress would be conveyed to many.  

Some Labour thinkers who regard themselves as pessimism-tinged realists suppose that Starmer is on course to be a 21st century version of Neil Kinnock – a man who makes Labour electable again but then hands on to a successor to complete the mission. In making such a diagnosis they suppose that they are downplaying expectations. The truth is that currently he is looking nowhere near as good as that.