It’s ironic to think, at the end of Keir Starmer’s premiership, that his problems began almost at the start of it.
One of my first editorials for ConservativeHome on the man who became known in our office as ‘the adenoidal overlord’ was; that in politics, it’s not the suits, the flat, the glasses, the tickets. It’s not the U-turns – forced largely by the Conservative opposition, or his own backbenchers. It’s not the Chagos Islands, the collapsed China spy trial or the limp cave in on their spy-hub embassy, it’s not Mandelson, a rack of ministers resigning, or the missing-in-action Defence Investment Plan.
I mean, all of these were the fuel he kept throwing on his own political pyre, but the really toxic thing that inhabited all of these moments and kept it burning was the hypocrisy.
The four years of camping on the nearest bit of moral high ground he could find, to claim the Conservatives were just bad people, who once he replaced all would be well. The failure to spot that if you offer change you meant change for the better not what you delivered, which is worse. The self awarded ‘country before party’ badge tarnished by hurling people under buses because in the end it was his job first.
The surviving Cabinet, those ‘un-resigned’ but now resigned to his fate, and possibly their own, gushed about his ‘legacy’ online, and cheered in the House of Commons yesterday, whilst they simultaneously horse-traded via Louise Hague, one of the first who had to resign, for a job with the MP who would be PM, or just beg via mobile to cling to the one they’ve currently got.
And Kemi Badenoch knew people don’t like watching a man being kicked when he’s down. So she didn’t.
Instead she went for those who cheered him to the rafters but had – and I’m sorry it is a well known and widely accepted rhetorical leitmotiv for betrayal not really a trigger to public violence – ‘stabbed him in the back’.
Tulip Saddiq the anti-corruption minister who had to resign after she and her auntie were accused of corruption, took to her feet after PMQs and railed how language matters. How it can extend to actions outside parliament where women particularly can feel threatened. I would never dismiss such concerns, nobody should feel unsafe, but it was odd coming from a woman, who threatened a pregnant producer who worked for Channel 4 outside Parliament, for asking her difficult questions about her aunt.
Politics is a brutal game, everyone knows that, but hard words from a despatch box are nothing to watching Labour MPs and front benchers rallying for their leader having just told him it was time to pack it in because he was so unpopular.
It was hypocrisy to cry foul over some of Kemi Badenoch’s barbs – she is known for not sugarcoating things, calling Bridget Phillipson ‘incompetent’ and ‘a spiteful class warrior’ – and then claiming this was some form of ‘new low’
New low?
What? Compared to Angela Rayner branding the entire Tory Party ‘scum’? David Lammy describing the ERG group of Tory Brexiteers ‘Nazis’? John McDonnell asking why Esther McVey shouldn’t be ‘lynched’? Bridget Phillipson branding Nick Timothy a ‘racist’? Ed Davey calling Boris Johnson a ‘traitor’?
What is low behaviour is the collective amnesia of Labour MPs, clearly corralled into shaming Kemi Badenoch over PMQs. It didn’t just extend to the mask-slipping revelation that it would seem because they are the ‘good guys’ it’s ok if you insult ‘the bad guy’ Tories but is outrageous the other way around. Worse they even ignored what Badenoch had actually said.
Apparently according to Keir, who like his Prime Ministerial predecessor Rishi Sunak, seems to have come out of his shell since he chucked it all in, it was because Badenoch had had a go at Phillipson’s working class story. It is a social mobility success story, all power to her for getting where she did, growing up as it happens, under the Tories.
However nobody mentioned her roots. Just Labour. And as Kemi said later online:
‘”I grew up on a council estate” is not an excuse for failure’
Quite apart from the fact, lots of Tories aren’t from a posh background, and plenty of Labour politicians have used independent schools to educate their kids, their howl of indignation ignored the fact – very deliberately – that a poll has come out where 0 per cent of NEU teachers said Philipson was doing a good job and 72 per cent were negative about her performance, and that many a parent of children in independent schools think her VAT on fees, was class-war inspired spite.
I’ve met scores of parents who’ve had to move out of schools that they paid for -whilst rightly paying tax to educate other kids- who are neither posh nor that well off but made a free choice. They could have had cars, or a nicer house, or holidays, or for that matter designer suits and glasses but they chose instead to invest their money in their children’s education and taken from them all because the education secretary thinks that’s morally wrong. Some of them I’ve spoken to weren’t even Tories. They might be now.
And Bridget Phillipson could have weathered any such criticism if it had actually raised the money to pay for all the teachers she claimed it would – but it hasn’t. Numbers are down, and though she shook her head at this being raised, no amount of statistical jiggery-pokery posted later to prove otherwise passes real scrutiny. The online ‘community note’ squad quickly posting why the government numbers are bogus.
Kemi in many ways was doing – not to Starmer, but those that have moved him on – something she’s there to do: tell the truth. And yes, the truth hurts.
As for the man of that moment, Keir Starmer, it’s a bit off to talk about yourself having ‘good grace’, twice, when a stack of allied whisperers has been telling lobby journalists that he’s angry, hurt and feels betrayed, and that he doesn’t really rate Andy Burnham, the man of the moments to come.
I have a lot of criticisms of Boris Johnson but one thing he was absolutely right about, when the herd moves, it moves. The Makerfield sheep pen is filling fast, all at the blink of a lashed eye.
Big Al Carns, and disingenuous Darren Jones are not going to stop the ‘naughty boy’ from being the Labour Messiah, but if any of them think he’s going to produce miracles they’re mistaken. The challenges, and they are huge, are the same for Burnham as they were for Starmer.
Kemi Badenoch may have a sharp tongue sometimes, but I look around, sometimes not even at the Tory benches, and think, yes, you are uncomfortable because she’s just saying what you yourself have been thinking.
Will Andy Burnham forcing some of the architects of Labour’s current problems into lesser jobs – or no job at all -be considered spiteful for doing so?
I doubt it. For some it will be richly deserved.