In 1971, the BBC aired a documentary entitled “Yesterday’s Men”. The programme’s virtues include a song by Paul McCartney’s brother, that it got David Dimbleby in a lot of trouble, and that it made Harold Wilson very cross. Not bad for only 45 minutes of television.
Pitched to Labour as “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” – an insight into the party’s first year out of power after Edward Heath’s unexpected victory – Wilson and his colleagues were, per the BBC website, “tricked into taking part in a programme that would ridicule them”. Kuenssberg could never.
To the strains of an especially-commissioned satirical song – “We’re not the big shots anymore/ where are the autograph hunters? / Yesterday, we were front pages news, / now it’s only the past to confront us” runs the chorus – it made Labour’s frontbench look absurd. James Callaghan lamented the limitations of an MP’s salary; Wilson’s extensive property portfolio was well-detailed.
Not only because it exposed a tax avoidance scheme involving the royalties of his memoir, the ex-PM was outraged. Any hope the programme would make him seem folksy – sing-a-longs in the Labour club, studious visits to churches and golf courses – was shot. The white heat of socialist revolution appeared to have given way to bitter irrelevance and desperation for renumeration.
The title was the greatest blow. It had been a Labour slogan the previous year, designed to present the Tory frontbench as tired and out of ideas. They weren’t wrong. But as the fate of Wilson’s and Callaghan’s shabby second punt at office proved, so was theirs. Both parties were lamentably unequal to the task of reversing Britain’s decline. Never such innocence again.
I trot out this history lesson on the eve of Labour’s first conference in government in fifteen years. No scion of the Dimbleby clan is needed to make this Keir Starmer seem preoccupied with personal enrichment or to look a little ridiculous. Record low poll ratings after only ten weeks do that.
As with the Liz Truss experiment, I had suspected that this government would quite quickly prove both incompetent and unpopular. And, as with the 49-Day Queen’s reign, I have been shocked by just how quickly my miserable assumptions have been borne out. Expect the worse, and be rewarded.
Back then, one had to show a little decorum, out of professional courtesy. This time around, there are no such limitations. Christ! They’re a bit rubbish, aren’t they? I’d half suspected that stories of the hopelessness of Labour governments were just old wives’ tales conjured up in Daily Telegraph leaders to frighten the punters. But the legends were true! Never doubted you, chaps.
Having a Prime Minister reduced to pleading “I’m completely in control” within weeks of entering Number 10 is an embarrassment. So will be the spectacle of reporters focusing more on what ministers are wearing and who paid for it than their conference speeches. Labour’s faithful head to Liverpool not to celebrate a 170-seat majority but to rue the day they first heard the name Sue Gray.
Paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher on being a lady, if you have to tell people you are in complete control, you aren’t. Like Wilson’s fury at having light shone on his money-grubbing, Starmer finds it outrageous that the lobby cares more about who paid for his wife’s dress than they do, say, Ed Miliband’s efforts to take us back to the Stone Age. But that’s the game he has chosen to play.
You cannot spend four years in Opposition piously feeding the beast of media outrage and then be shocked when it turns around and bites you on the arse. You especially cannot do so from your free hospitality box at the Emirates, whilst plundering pensioners to bung a wad to your union pals, and as your supposedly housetrained ethics droid merrily indulges in her numerous vendettas.
As the prisons empty of the only section of the population keener on voting Labour since July 5th, Starmer is plummeting down the predictable doom spiral engendered by coming to office historically unpopular, and then proceeding to do really unpopular things. Turns out that duping your voters and then stripping them of their benefits does badly with focus groups. Who knew?
Labour’s delusion is that doing the tough stuff now will provide the bandwidth for largesse later. Shiver at home this Christmas, Deirdrie, and, if you’re still here in five years, we will move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But where’s the omelette? What joy can five years of Starmer’s Britain offer?
Unfortunately, the answer to that is quite simple. It explains why Starmer is now unhappily, if expensively, ensconced in Number 10: a break from us. As entertaining as Labour’s ever-worsening plight is proving, Conservatives cannot escape that it is in power because we lost, because we failed, and because we are hated. Five years of hard Labour is our fitting punishment.
When Starmer blames us for Britain’s state, he isn’t wrong, even if he lathers it on a bit too thick. Yes, doll out some responsibility to Vladimir Putin and Wuhan’s third-tastiest bat soup. But if crime has been decriminalised, the migrant printer has gone brrrrr, and living standards haven’t recovered from the financial crisis, it happened on our watch. We should be appalled.
Yet if there is one really miserable – but oddly flattering – truth about this government, it is not that it is the change from Tory rule that their conference slogan strains to suggest. Rather than being too different from their Conservative predecessors, Labour are too similar. Appropriately for Liverpool, Starmer has seen us flounder, and done his best Yosser Hughes: “Gizza job! I can do that.”
A Number 10 with determined to spaff a substantial majority on interpersonal feuding? Check. A housing policy pursuing homes absolutely anywhere except where they’re needed? Check again. A crippling addiction to Treasury brain? Check the Third. Chuck in dubious donations, Nick Boles, and a penchant for talking to Tim Shipman, and it’s a fitting tribute act for #FourteenWastedYears.
The voters look from Labour to Tory, and from Tory to Labour, and from Labour to Tory again; but already it is impossible to say which is which. The Sunday Times suggests 26 per cent trust us most on the cost of living. 32 per cent prefer Labour. But 41 per cent don’t know. Similarly, 14 per cent think Labour are more corrupt, 26 per cent think us, and 39 per cent think we’re the same.
We are at the end of an age. If a growing number of voters want to put a plague on both our houses – and use every local government by-election as a chance to give Labour a good kicking – the next election will provide an unprecedented opportunity for a third party to break through a stale Tory-Labour duopoly. Reform’s numbers will continue to tick up and up.
As Friday’s jamboree made clear, Nigel Farage has every intention of turning his party on Labour and building a national campaigning machine. Next year’s local elections will be his next opportunity to show that he can turn discontent into actual representatives. If he does, what is Reform’s ceiling?
We’ve five long years to find out. This prospect should strike terror into any loyal Tory. The best our party can hope for is a politics that looks increasingly Germanic; the worst is one where we go the same way as the centre-right of several other of our European friends and neighbours. We are in the last chance saloon. Next time around, Reform really could finish us off.
God knows how that all plays out via first-past-the-post. But even if he won power, Farage is hardly free of the “Yesterday’s Man” charge. If Starmer and Gray can’t make the Whitehall work, after our brief hope of reforming was snuffed out, how quickly would a Reform government be overwhelmed? Farage would be back in The Westminister Arms, drowning his sorrows, in a week.
One might say this is a little overhasty. Labour haven’t been in power three months. To write them off as moribund so soon is absurd, especially when they are sitting on such a substantial majority. But of Labour’s 120 annual conferences, only 28 have taken place when the party has had a Commons majority. Tony Blair aside, Labour governments don’t tend to last very long.
This one has ducked its opportunity to be bold. It has no clear answers to the various demographic challenges that crippled us and will continue to cripple them. At best, they can reshuffle the deckchairs on our national Titanic. At worst, they will conspire to leave us even more stagnant, hamstrung by a perfomatively ludicrous energy policy and a stultifying reliance on mass migration.
None of this makes the life of the Conservative Party any easier. A few new councillors are no consolation for the impotence of Opposition. We are “Yesterday’s Men”. To have a Dimbleby make a programme about our ludicrousness would be a mark of respect that we don’t yet merit.
Yet even if the state of politics can seem undeniably bleak, a few rays of hope do penetrate the gathering autumn gloom. Even as our parliamentary representation has been gutted, the British centre-right is proving itself both intellectually fertile, and surprisingly united in its diagnosis.
Foundations, a report from three clever chaps, out last week, shows the growing consensus on what is going wrong with Britain, and how a future government with committed to national prosperity can turn things around. Nothing is written. Decline is a choice. If the Conservative Party wants to do more than watch Labour fail from behind the sofa, we must have the mettle to fight.
By all means, feel a little smug at Labour’s struggles. But we have work to do. See you all in Birmingham.