Politics For You@PoliticoForYou
ARTICLE 🚨
Keir Starmer is a wanker!
Not only a statement of fact, but it’s also a chant heard in football terraces up & down the county & even at recent Premier League darts events.
It is possible for Prime Minister’s to survive scandals, by-election defeats & local council losses. It is not possible for one to survive this kind of universal unpopularity.
Or at least if they do survive in the short term, the lasting damage they do to their parties brand could be fatal.
Let’s be clear. It is not unthinkable that Labour could find a way to come back from this, but not with Keir Starmer at the helm.
You only have to look to Canada for an example of a tired & unpopular governing party that is suddenly rejuvenated by a new leader.
That new leader wasn’t some young passionate firebrand, it wasn’t some left wing disrupter of the status quo. It was Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England.
But Carney had two secret ingredients that were absolutely pivotal to his success both in the last Canadian election & in securing a majority in the months after.
Number one, communication.
Carney had a story to tell voters & he knew how to tell it. His grasp of detail is impressive, his speeches are rousing & his debating style is formidable.
Number two, distance from the incumbent.
By playing no part in the previous Trudeau administration, Carney had sufficient distance between himself & what had came before him. He was able to portray himself as an outsider & a breath of fresh air despite his policy platform being that of a pretty standard liberal politician.
The next British Labour leader will need these same two ingredients.
Angela Rayner certainly has the first one ticked off. From humble beginnings, her remarkable career is a testament to what genuine hard work & determination should be able to achieve & it gives her a unique ability to talk to working people.
Her past tax scandal may have given her some distance from Starmer but not without delivering a blow to her credibility at the same time.
Wes Streeting on the other hand, has neither ingredient.
The stench of Keir Starmer’s unpopular policies sticks to him like dog shit to a pair of new shoes & his patronising communication style is like nails on a chalkboard to anyone outside of the Westminster bubble.
People loath Keir Starmer for a multitude of reasons. But overwhelmingly, it boils down to him being inauthentic & having no real story as to why he wanted to be Prime Minister, other than to give Peter Mandelson something to do.
Wes Streeting suffers from these exact same character flaws & to expect Labour’s prospects to be any brighter under a man who may well have been grown in a lab from a speck of Tony Blair’s dandruff, is surely the dictionary definition of insanity.
There is one candidate who fits the Mark Carney criteria & it is quite obviously Andy Burnham.
He has the highest approval rating of any Labour politician. He can give a speech without making a room full of journalists lose the will to live, & having served as Mayor of Greater Manchester for almost a decade, he comes without all the baggage of a deeply unpopular Starmer government.
Unfortunately for Burnham, his greatest asset is also his biggest hurdle.
Allowing a potential challenger to return to Westminster is the last thing Keir Starmer wants & on top of that, Burnham would have to find a winnable Labour seat to stand in, of which there may not be many left.
One thing is certain, Keir Starmer’s latest big government reset looks to have done little to reassure disgruntled Labour MP’s & despondent Labour activists. It is also unlikely that the next reset in a month’s time will help either, or indeed the one after that.
It is this lack of clear leadership contender that is the only thing keeping Keir Starmer in power, & with every day that passes, he damages Labour’s credibility further & increases the chances of Nigel Farage sauntering into No. 10 virtually unopposed.
