A smell of death is now seeping out of Westminster, choking the atmosphere of the nation, poisoning everything it touches. With each new crisis, the smell only gets stronger and the reaction from the public more visceral. Where there was once frustration with the Government, then anger, and then contempt, now there is something closer to disgust: sewage in the sea, poison in the rivers, crumbling concrete in the schools, councils going bankrupt, and unknown ministers demanding to be thanked for it all.
The truth is, when such a stench gathers, it is all but impossible for a government to decontaminate. It happened to the Tories in the early Sixties, Labour in the late Seventies and then again to the Tories in the Nineties. Regardless of the personal strengths of the prime ministers at the time — and the weaknesses of their opponents — there comes a time when the public and the media can only wrinkle their noses in disgust. When this happens, a different transformation takes place on the other side of the political aisle. Suddenly the leader of the opposition changes into that altogether different beast: a prospective prime minister.
“Whether the government is as good as dead or not” wrote Guardian’s Peter Jenkins in 1977, two years before Margaret Thatcher’s defining triumph, “the psychological moment may have arrived at which people begin to look at the Tory leader in a new way…” There are dangers in such moments of course. Back in 1977, for instance, Jenkins noted that “the sweet promise of success may… give release to her high-spirited instincts which lie naturally a good deal farther to the right than she cares to let on”.
How true that would prove. Yet before she became prime minister she would keep these instincts in check. From 1975 to 1979, “caution and ambition [were] the two reins of her passion”, as Jenkins put it.
Today, something similar is true of Keir Starmer, though perhaps it is not his own high-spirited instincts he’s worried about revealing but those of the party he leads. Either way, it is certainly true that, like Thatcher before him, Starmer has led his party with skill and restraint, reining the Labour party to his own ambition.
Consider, as evidence, this week’s carefully managed but effective reshuffle, sidelining enemies and promoting ideological allies. In many ways, in fact, Starmer’s leadership is more effective than even Thatcher’s at the same stage in the electoral cycle, having now demoted almost anyone who has challenged his authority while also forming a degree of ideological cohesion in the process. It would take Thatcher much of her first term — and a foreign war — to truly stamp her authority on the party.
The big winners from this week’s reshuffle were obviously the Blairites. Six of his shadow cabinet are not just Blairite by inclination — they were actually special advisers under Blair himself. This is quite a turnaround for Starmer, whose instincts have always appeared to lie much further to the Left than Blair. In 2010, for instance, when the Labour party was agonising over whether or not to return to the Blairite playbook with David Miliband or to begin its journey of rejection under Ed Miliband, Starmer was in Team Ed. When Jeremy Corbyn’s behaviour became too much for many Labour MPs to swallow, Starmer held his nose and gulped down his responsibilities, rising to shadow Brexit secretary and remaining in place throughout Corbyn’s leadership. There is a steel to Starmer which is perhaps more revealing than anything else — a discipline we should take note of.
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