Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧@JChimirie66677
Fifteen Percent. Fifteen Hundred Seats. A Ten Year Plan. One Word Covers It. Delusion.
Keir Starmer's response to the worst local election result in Labour history is to announce that he intends to govern for a decade. Let that land for a moment.
Fifteen percent of the national vote. Fifteen hundred councillors lost. Wales gone to Plaid Cymru for the first time since devolution. Sunderland fallen after fifty years. Gateshead, Blackburn, Tameside. Josh Simons, the former director of Labour Together, the organisation that put Starmer in Downing Street, writing in the Sunday Times that he has lost the country. Forty of his own MPs calling for his resignation. The general secretary of Unite demanding a timetable for his departure. And Starmer's answer to all of it is that he plans to be in Downing Street until 2034. One word covers it. Delusion. A man who has lost the country does not get to decide he will govern it for another decade.
Starmer's interview in the Observer contains something even more revealing than the ten year claim. After the most emphatic rejection of Labour's agenda in modern electoral history, driven in significant part by public fury over immigration and the loss of border control, Starmer's bold response is to announce a new youth mobility scheme with the European Union that will allow tens of thousands of young Europeans to come to Britain annually. He describes this as being full-throated and bold. The voters who handed Reform those fifty year Labour strongholds on Thursday will have a different description.
Moreover, the Catherine West stalking horse challenge raises a question that deserves to be asked plainly. Is this orchestrated? Under Labour's rules a leadership challenge can only be triggered once per year before conference. If West fails to reach the 81 nomination threshold the challenge collapses and Starmer gains a year of protection. If she reaches 81 and triggers a full membership ballot, Starmer goes on the ballot paper automatically and Labour's membership, which historically skews left, decides. The serious candidates, Burnham, Rayner, Streeting, have all scrambled to distance themselves from West's move. They may have calculated that a failed stalking horse challenge now locks Starmer in and removes the pressure for an orderly transition. The beneficiary of a botched challenge is Starmer himself.
Meanwhile the Mandelson files have not yet been fully released. Parliament returns after the King's Speech. Ian Collard's written evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee is still outstanding. The privileges committee referral remains in play. Whatever Cat Little would not discuss in open committee is still sitting in that vetting file. Starmer's ten year project depends on none of that reaching critical mass. It is a considerable bet.
Starmer's attack on Nigel Farage's funding is the most transparent deflection in the interview. A Prime Minister facing forty resignation demands from his own MPs, a stalking horse leadership challenge, historic local election losses and unresolved national security questions about his most controversial appointment reaches for a story about cryptocurrency donations to his political opponent. The country is not fooled and neither is the press.
Josh Simons, until this weekend one of Starmer's most loyal allies, wrote that Starmer has lost the country and cannot rise to this moment. That is not a verdict from an enemy. It is a verdict from someone who built the machine that put him in Downing Street.
A Prime Minister who responds to that verdict by announcing a ten year project has not heard it. A Prime Minister who responds to the worst immigration driven electoral revolt in Labour history by announcing new immigration routes from Europe has not heard it. A Prime Minister who calls a stalking horse challenge a distraction has not heard it. The country spoke on Thursday. This man cannot hear it. And that, more than anything else, is why he has to go.
