The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-24)

Tory scandals

and the cost

of living have

relegated

Brexit at the

polling booth

ing he was dragging down the reputation

of his party. Johnson responded by accus-

ing Starmer of failing to prosecute the

paedophile Jimmy Savile while serving as

director of public prosecutions.

The ugly personal attacks subsided

with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine,

but resumed this week after Johnson’s

fixed-penalty notice.

Locking horns again at prime minis-

ter’s questions, Starmer again accused

Johnson of seeking to “blame everyone

else” for his actions and of castigating the

BBC and the Archbishop of Canterbury

over their criticisms of the government’s

immigration deal with Rwanda.

This infuriated Johnson, who accused

Starmer of being “out of his tiny mind”

and misreporting his comments on

Rwanda. “He is a Corbynista in a smart

Islington suit — that is the truth,” he said.

Unlike Johnson, who has repeatedly

refused to correct the record, Starmer

did so the following day on being

informed that Johnson had not attacked

the BBC as reported.

Having watched the government try

and fail to block his contempt motion, by

Thursday evening Starmer was in a jubi-

lant mood and took members of his team

to celebrate over a pint.

However, there are many who think

Is Sir Keir Starmer doing a good job as

leader of the opposition?

Have your say at sundaytimes.co.uk/poll

Focusing

on the

lockdown

scandal

makes us

look out

of touch

We need

an inquest

to check

whether

the party

still has a

pulse

that any celebration is far too premature

and he and his party should be doing far

better with the voters.

Senior Labour figures are concerned

that the parties scandal is still not cutting

through with the electorate. A shadow

cabinet member said: “There are some

sections of the electorate who just hate

Boris and have already made their mind

up about him. But there are others who

think the entire political class has been

sullied by the partygate scandal and we

are all as bad as each other. Those people

are bemused that all Labour seems to be

doing is talking about lockdown-breaking

parties when the cost-of-living crisis

means they are having to choose

between heating their homes and feeding

their kids. It makes us look out of touch.”

Labour will begin a week-long focus on

the cost-of-living crisis tomorrow with an

announcement that the party will legis-

late to abolish non-domicile status.

The policy shift — which follows revela-

tions that Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata

Murty, who is Indian, claims non-dom

status and saves millions in tax on divi-

dends collected from her family’s IT busi-

ness empire — is an attempt to target

doorstep friendly issues before the local

elections on May 5.

The party is also thought to be holding

talks with a number of “wavering Tories”

about defecting. Conservative whips are

particularly concerned about Dehenna

Davison, the MP for the red wall seat

Bishop Auckland. Another seven Tory

MPs are also believed to have held talks

with Labour in recent months.

However, Labour strategists fear that

the party will face an uphill battle in next

month’s poll. They point to a difficult

electoral cycle given the gains they made

in areas such as London in 2018, when

the council seats in this year’s election

were last contested.

“I would be happy if we made a single

gain,” said one party insider. “There

simply aren’t lots of seats that we are

going to convert to Labour. The Tories

always play this game by setting an unre-

alistic high-water mark and suggesting

that if we do not win seats like Wand-

sworth and Westminster then we have

T

he cost-of-living crisis,

controversy over the

chancellor’s tax affairs

and the fallout from the

No 10 lockdown parties

would seem to offer Labour

an open goal at next month’s

local elections in England.

But it may not be as simple

as that. Most of the more than

4,350 seats falling vacant

were last contested in 2018

when the party posted its

best performance at local

level since 2012. Our

calculation for The Sunday

Times of the “national

equivalent vote” — a measure

of how the parties would have

fared if the local elections had

taken place in every part of

the country — put Labour on

36 per cent, only a point

behind the Tories.

Since then the party has

fallen back, especially in

parts of the so-called red wall

in England at the 2021 local

elections. Its record in

council by-elections has also

been patchy during the past

year, making fewer gains

COLIN RALLINGS AND

MICHAEL THRASHER CHAEL THRASHER

from the Tories than losses.

However, any swing to

Labour now will make the

Tories lose ground and

confirm Labour’s current

opinion poll lead. And the

bigger the losses, the more

the prime minister’s position

will come under threat from

his own MPs.

London, which accounts

for more than four in ten of

all the English seats in play,

has long been an exception to

the recent pattern of Labour

electoral woes. The number

of councillors elected in 2018

reached almost a 50-year

high. In 17 out of the 32

boroughs it has at least three-

quarters of all councillors.

The Tories, by contrast, fell

back to their lowest total of

councillors since the

boroughs were created in

1964, although they did retain

most of the councils they

controlled. The spotlight this

time will again fall on their

low council tax flagships of

Wandsworth and

Westminster.

Labour won more votes

but fewer seats in

Wandsworth last time and

will be desperate to avoid the

same outcome in a borough

where they hold all three

constituencies.

The Tories gained Barnet

against the run of play in 2018

failed. It’s just nonsense. These are about

the most Tory seats in the country where

council tax is always kept artificially low

to keep their voters onside.”

There are also concerns about the

inroads the party will make in working-

class areas of the north and Midlands

known as the red wall. Starmer will need

to start winning back these areas if he is to

stand any chance of winning the next

general election. But there are fears vot-

ers are still not ready to come back to

Labour after they turned against the

party under Jeremy Corbyn.

“Voters are now open to Labour again

in a way they have not been for many

years,” one of the party’s MPs said. “They

are looking in the shop window but they

are not yet necessarily prepared to buy

anything.”

Although Starmer now enjoys the best

approval rating of any party leader, there

are still concerns that the electorate has

not yet warmed to him. The Labour

leader has often been criticised for being

too dry and lacking charisma and dyna-

mism. “Whenever I see Keir, the image

that often comes to mind is of a wooden

plank,” one senior party figure said. “I

often feel that we need to carry out an

inquest into the party to see if it still has a

pulse.”

This view is believed to be shared by

Tony Blair, the former Labour prime

minister. He thinks that most of the

shadow cabinet are “rubbish”, including

Starmer, according to a close friend. The

friend said that neither man wanted to

make an enemy of the other publicly and

so their mutual distrust was not likely to

spill out into public.

This was contradicted by a Blair

spokesman who said: “This is completely

untrue. He has not said that and on the

contrary believes Keir Starmer has

shown strength, determination and intel-

ligence in setting Labour back on a win-

ning path.”

One person said that Blair was occupy-

ing himself with the forthcoming launch

of the Britain Project: a cross-party alli-

ance billing itself as the “home for hope-

ful politics”. The former Tory minister

Rory Stewart, Blair’s former speech

writer Phil Collins and the broadcaster

Trevor Phillips are among those

involved. Its goals are unclear. Some

believe that it will become a British ver-

sion of En Marche, the centrist party that

propelled Emmanuel Macron to power in

France, with Blair playing a major role.

Others say its purpose remains amor-

phous but is borne out of disaffection

with Starmer’s uninspiring leadership

and failure to win over disaffected Tory

voters.

A recent poll by Michael Brooks, the

No 10 polling expert, which was shown to

government special advisers, appears to

show that Starmer is not making inroads

into the Conservative vote. “Starmer is

tracking around the same place as Ed

Miliband was,” one aide said. “It’s not

that their vote is great, it’s that ours is

apathetic.”

Starmer is desperate to contrast him-

self against Johnson as the moral and law-

abiding alternative prime minister.

According to those who know Starmer

best, he is genuinely “disgusted” by John-

son’s behaviour. “He finds his cavalier

approach to the truth and to rule-break-

ing offensive,” the source said.

The question Labour is asking itself is

whether the public are ready to abandon

an affable rogue like Johnson for some-

one more wooden and serious.

The ace up Starmer’s sleeve,

Robert Colvile, page 26

A year ago, Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership
was hanging by a thread amid fears that
his party was about to get a drubbing in
the local elections. Now it is Boris John-
son whose leadership is in the doldrums,
while the Labour leader’s position has
been cemented and the received wisdom
is that he will survive to fight the next
general election.
Starmer and his aides were in his office
in the Norman Shaw buildings, on the
edge of the parliamentary estate, when
they learnt shortly after 11am on Thurs-
day that the government had capitulated
over the contempt of parliament motion
they were attempting to bring against
Johnson.
The Labour WhatsApp groups were
instantly alive with white flag emojis sig-
nalling the Tory surrender and people
were laughing about the PM’s apparent
own goal, a source said. Labour has
stretched its lead over the Tories by three
points since Johnson was handed a fixed-
penalty notice by police 12 days ago and
now has an average gap of eight points.
Starmer’s rise in the polls has coin-
cided with a noticeable change in tactics
in recent months, by which he has
switched seamlessly in parliament from
statesman to bully boy.
After being elected leader at the start
of the pandemic, he was quick to offer
support for the government’s lockdown
measures, describing his role as “con-
structive opposition”.
While those closest to him believed
that this insulated them from allegations
of trying to politicise the crisis, to many
MPs it felt as though Labour had become
largely irrelevant. All that changed when
stories of lockdown-breaking gatherings
in Downing Street began to emerge at the
end of last year.
The prospect that the prime minister
and his coterie of advisers had broken the
rules they had made appears to have trig-
gered a change in Starmer.
From December onwards, his appear-
ances in the Commons became far more
combative, culminating in the now infa-
mous exchange on January 31 when he
launched a devastating attack on John-
son’s personal integrity, calling him inca-
pable of “honesty and decency” and say-

Caroline Wheeler, Gabriel Pogrund
and Harry Yorke

Sir Keir Starmer

has got voters to

look in Labour’s

shop window but

they are not yet

ready to buy,

according to one

of his MPs

Is Starmer ever going to win

back the love Labour’s lost?

6

POLITICS

The leader has gone for Johnson’s jugular lately but some insiders still liken him to a ‘wooden plank’ who should be doing better
STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA