Political Observer just steps out of the way!
MAY 12, 2024
Do the headline and sub-headline tell the full story?
Headline: Who’s gaslighting who? Sunak and Starmer are stuck in the blame game
Sub-headline: As the economy sputters into life, voters can’t believe it. The Tories can take a victory lap, but Labour disputes that no one feels any richer
Should this twitter post from @rcolvile surprise The Reader?
Yet until The Reader herself confronts the Colvile Chatter, but I’m getting ahead of myself! Quotations from this essay are revelatory:
One of the great myths of British politics is that power invites scrutiny. In fact, as Tony Blair found in 1997 and Sir Keir Starmer is finding now, it’s really rather pleasant being the anointed successor to an unpopular government. Suddenly everything you do takes on a rosy glow. Newspapers and magazines fill with admiring profiles of your staff, strategy and philosophy. Voters who thought you awkward and nasal suddenly decide that if everyone else seems to like you, you can’t be that bad. From struggling to get attention, you suddenly find the press hanging on your every word.
Last week Starmer visited Dover, the seat occupied by his new star defector, Natalie Elphicke — a description, given Elphicke’s politics, that feels almost as incongruous as “vegan activist Nigel Farage”. There he unveiled a package of measures to secure the border: there would be an elite new force, the Border Security Command, tasked with working across government to smash the smugglers. There would be more money. There would be greater co-operation with the French.
How different from the discredited Tory approach! That merely involved extra funding for a new Small Boats Operational Command, which co-operates with the French while joining up efforts across government. Admittedly, Starmer said he’d get MI5 involved, while the Tories highlighted the role of the Royal Navy. In both cases, one suspects, because it made the announcement sound cooler.
If the Conservatives had tried such blatant copy-and-pasting, they’d have been ridiculed. Indeed, speaking of copy-and-pasting, Rachel Reeves was also out and about last week. The shadow chancellor — who barely missed an electoral step when it was revealed that chunks of her book had been lifted from more than 20 other sources — accused the Tories of “gaslighting” the public over the economy, and warned voters not to be taken in.
What did she mean? The speech was an attempt to pre-emptively discredit the Tories’ last, best hope of an electoral turnaround: to argue that things are getting better, the plan is working, the economy is improving, don’t let Labour ruin it. Sure enough, on Friday it was confirmed that the economy was out of recession. And not just out of recession, but growing far more perkily than anyone predicted.
The Reader might turn to @JohnJCrace column of Wednesday May 8, 2024 as the political precursor to @rcolvile ? Mr Crace offers what Colvile cannot, political candor , wedded to wit, salt and style!
Headline: Natalie Elphicke’s queasy welcome shows Labour will turn no one away
Sub-headline: A quick win is a quick win for Keir Starmer. Never mind the politics, just feel that Tory majority weakening
Some things you just don’t see coming. Defections from the Tory party may be very on trend: just last month it was Dan Poulter. Or Dan Who? to his friends. But when Natalie Elphicke took her place right behind Keir Starmer on the Labour benches for prime minister’s questions there were open mouths on both sides of the Commons. Penny Mordaunt had to do a quick double-take. Could it be? Surely not. It was. She dashed to the speaker’s chair to warn the prime minister.
Elphicke is no ordinary defector. Not some Tory wet like Dripping Dan, who was so centre-right, one nation that he may as well have been Labour anyway. Natalie is about as far to the right as you can get. Not only that, but with an unpleasant backstory too.
A woman who defended her former husband, Charlie, the previous MP for Dover, until she inherited the constituency after he had been convicted of three charges of sexual assault. Not the best of looks. Natalie was even suspended from the Commons after she was found to have tried to influence the judge presiding over his trial.
…
In the final paragraphs:
PMQs now represents a Theatre of Cruelty, its every second a reminder of Sunak’s own inadequacy. It starts with the cheers that greet his arrival in the Commons. They’ve gone from the ironic to the openly mocking. No one thinks he is doing a good job. No one holds him in any affection. He only gets to keep his job because it would look even worse to sack him so soon before a general election. An election they all know they are going to lose. Gallows humour is all that is left. Dignity long gone.
Everyone knows the score. None more so than the Labour leader. Time was when Starmer was more wary around Rish!. Took him seriously as a political opponent. Now he is almost demob happy. The game of PMQs is just too easy for him. Sunak is just a plaything. A rag doll to be kicked around and punched. Before being discarded.
Starmer began by crowing about the local election results. Rish! looked as if he might start crying before starting to read out the names of all the successful Tory councillors. There are so few, it didn’t take long. Sunak retreated into his safe place: the investigation into Angela Rayner. Keir just smirked. People in glass houses, etc. Had the prime minister forgotten that he had two convictions himself?
After that it was all just fun, fun, fun. All the places where Sunak has fifth homes – the ones we know about – were now under Labour control. So at least he would be safe. Could Rish! think of any of his policies that were actually working? At the current rate of progress it would take 300 years to deport every refugee to Rwanda. Sunak’s comebacks just died a death. Not even his own backbenchers could keep up the pretence that they were enjoying this.
We ended with Sunak unexpectedly blurting out an inconvenient truth. “There is no long-term policy,” he said. Of course there isn’t. Everything is concentrated on short-term survival. The prime minister had been spat out and ground into the dust. You wouldn’t treat an animal like this.
Political Observer
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