10 Wednesday June 8 2022 | the times
News
Sir Keir Starmer will struggle to win the
next election unless Labour overhauls
its economic policy, Lord Mandelson is
to warn today.
The former Labour business secre-
tary will use a speech to say Starmer
risks “sneaking over the finishing line”
in 2024 and condemning Britain to “in-
ertia and decline” rather than winning
convincingly.
Mandelson still wields considerable
influence within the Labour leadership.
His intervention will add to growing
anxiety among senior opposition
figures about Starmer’s readiness for
government.
Mandelson will urge Labour to focus
on raising the country’s “long-term
growth rate”, adding that Starmer
needs to demonstrate “ambition and
hard thinking” to ensure a “watershed
win like Mrs Thatcher’s in 1979”.
The peer will also suggest that there
is a “desperate need” for Labour to re-
tain parts of Boris Johnson’s economic
strategy, particularly on research and
innovation, if it wins power.
“I am glad that Keir Starmer now
wants to build on New Labour’s legacy,”
Mandelson will tell the North East
Chamber of Commerce in Durham.
“But this requires thinking deeply
about how the world has changed since
then and the opportunities it offers, as
well as assessing realistically what we
got right and where we could have done
better.”
He will call on the Labour leader to
“build a more equitable globalisation”
and “pay greater attention to issues
connected with national resilience and
security”. He will add: “I believe the
next Labour government must give
laser-like attention to the new industri-
al and technology-empowered policies
needed to spur growth and mitigate the
effects of Brexit.”
He will explicitly question the wis-
dom of the party’s pledge to spend
£28 billion every year for a decade on
the transition to net zero. “Just an-
nouncing a massive spend and a big
policy goal does not in itself deliver eco-
nomic growth,” he will say.
Mandelson will say he wants Labour
to develop a plan to stop Britain “drift-
ing back to the sclerosis we experienced
in the 1970s”.
Some shadow cabinet ministers be-
lieve that Labour should follow Olaf
Scholz, the German chancellor, and de-
velop an economic agenda that builds
national self-sufficiency and resilience
to external shocks as well as remaining
open to globalisation.
Mandelson will echo that sentiment
today. Admitting that New Labour
“could have done more to lay the foun-
dations of the economy Britain needs to
prosper in this century”, he will say: “I
believe in hard-headed globalism, not
global altruism.”
Doubts linger over the Labour
leader’s grasp of economics. One shad-
ow cabinet minister said: “Keir still
needs to set out a vision beyond pri-
mary colours.”
Starmer has been holding weekly
strategy meetings with Rachel Reeves,
the shadow chancellor, to refine the
party’s policy offer before an election.
Labour has made few concrete com-
mitments on economic or fiscal policy
beyond its repeated call for a windfall
tax, which the Treasury belatedly heed-
ed last month. Even close allies of
Starmer privately concede there is a
“huge black hole” in the party’s policy
platform that must be filled with a co-
herent fiscal policy.
Sir Tony Blair has also urged Starmer
to develop a policy programme that is
“radical without being dangerous” and
restore the party’s economic credibility.
A Conservative MP who accused the
BBC of making Boris Johnson look like
Hannibal Lecter used a six-month-old
image to criticise its “corrosive” cover-
age of the No 10 parties scandal.
Adam Holloway, the MP for Grav-
esham, appeared on Newsnight after
Monday’s confidence vote and held up
a graphic of Johnson used by the show,
which he said bore a resemblance to the
cannibalistic serial killer played by
Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the
Lambs. Holloway appeared to suggestGnashing of teeth over BBC’s ‘Dr Lecter’ image of PM
that the image had featured on
Monday’s episode of the programme,
bemusing some at the BBC, which
struggled to find the graphic he was
showing on his tablet. Holloway later
said that the picture was from the Janu-
ary 19 episode of the programme, which
was presented by Kirsty Wark.
“It is problematic for the BBC,” he
told The Times. Holloway, a former ITV
News journalist, said that media cover-
age of the scandal had been “over-
blown” and damaging for the prime
minister. “They’ve been looking for a
big gotcha [moment] on Boris and allthe way down the line, they failed to get
it,” he said. “I just don’t think that we’ve
got this one right. I don’t think it’s been
the best sort of journalism.”
During the interview, Holloway said:
“There’s great damage to the reputa-
tion of politics. And I think also, at some
point, it should do damage to organisa-
tions like the BBC. This programme
that I am on now was showing pictures
of him looking like Hannibal Lecter at
the beginning.”
He later held up the graphic and
added: “Does that guy look like some-
body who has, you know, been given abirthday cake or someone who, you
know, has been locked up for some-
thing at the Old Bailey?”
The BBC declined to comment but
insiders said that the clip revealed a de-
sire to deflect attention from Johnson.
Lee Anderson, the Conservative MP
for Ashfield, also criticised the BBC.
“You’ve had it in for Boris from day one,
it’s been a massive witch hunt,” he said.
“It’s about time you got off his back, let
him crack on with running the country.
Come back and talk to me in two years’
time when he’s delivered on his pro-
mises then we’ll see where we are then.”Jake Kanter Media CorrespondentNews Politics
Mandelson has lessons for Labour
Patrick Maguire Red Box Editor
Quentin
Letts
Rayner fired
her bazooka
with abandon
V
olodymyr Zelensky (Kyiv
Central) was glad Boris
Johnson survived
Monday’s political
assassination attempt.
The Ukrainian leader was “very
happy” about this “great news”.
Closer to home, joy was more
contained. Labour’s deputy leader,
Angela Rayner, was at the
Commons dispatch box, aiming her
bazooka at Johnson’s tank.
Ka-BOOM! Down came a nearby
water tower. Ka-BOOM! There
went a minaret and some traffic
lights. Ka-BOOM! Another miss.
Devil of a recoil on these bazookas.
Swivelling on her gym shoes,
whacking the dispatch box as if it
was a Chippendale’s buttock, our
Angela roared that the current
prime minister was indecent,
rotten, a squanderer of goodwill,
unworthy of his office, a
downgrader of standards. The
words “go **** yourself, Russian
warship!” were not quite uttered
but that was roughly the flavour
of it.
Johnson, in Rayner’s considered
view, was an ocean-going wrong ’un
who was “dragging our
democracy into the gutter”.
“He is dragging the
Conservative Party down,” she
continued. “That is not a good
thing for the Labour Party.”
Hon members: “Oh?” Rayner:
“This is not about politics.”
Hon members: “!!!”
Rayner: “It is time to
stop the rot.” At which,
good to her word, she
reached the end of her
speech.
It took a moment or
two for everyone to
realise she had
stopped. Then the
blackbirds started
singing again and
snails emerged fromtheir shells to ask “is that my
tinnitus or is someone sounding the
all-clear?” Rayner turned in her
seat to throw a tender glance at
Sam Tarry (Lab, Ilford South),
sitting a couple of rows behind her
in a petrol-blue suit. He did not
notice, or even feel the draught
from, the fluttering of her
eyelashes. The swine.
It was an opposition-day debate
on standards in public life.
Labour’s motion “recognised the
importance of the ministerial
code” and made a few further
small-print observations about a
recent report by the
committee on standards
in public life. The
government was so
disturbed by this
radical proposal that,
er, it announced it
would not bother
opposing it. If there
was a Baldrick-style
cunning plan at
play, it was to allow
Rayner to say rude
things in parliament
about Johnson’scharacter, and thus perhaps grab
some political oxygen.
Outside, Westminster was
washed in June sunshine. It was
lunch.
Attendance was slight. Rayner,
like a provincial-rep’ Lear in the
1950s, found herself performing her
heath scene to a sparsely filled
stalls. Management had closed the
dress circle and given most
usherettes the day off. The
opposition benches were hardly
packed. The government side
contained just four backbench
MPs. They did not include Sir
Jeremy Wright (C, Kenilworth &
Southam), even though he is the
Conservatives’ representative on
the committee for standards in
public life. His committee colleague
Dame Margaret Beckett (Lab,
Derby South) was there, though.
Dame This, Sir That: so many
parliamentarians now have titles.
There was a brief spell under
Gordon Brown when such things
felt ridiculously archaic.
Now, five of the seven members
of the committee for standards in
public life have political gongs.Paddling in the gravy.
Rayner announced that if Labour
regained power it would establish
an ethics commission to scrutinise
public-office holders. Danny
Kruger (C, Devizes) thought this a
“very dangerous proposal” as it
would give an “unelected individual
this godlike power to judge the
morals of ministers”.
“Exactly!” cried a Labour MP.
Kruger felt this was an echo of
Soviet-style commissars “who sit
alongside politicians, judging them
on their conformity to moral
standards and ideology”.
John Penrose (C, Weston-super-
Mare) made a speech so admiring
of the government, it was hard to
comprehend why he quit as
Johnson’s anti-corruption adviser
on Monday. Penrose, channelling
Peter Simple’s Lieutenant General
Sir Frederick “Tiger” Nidgett,
barked that it was all about
“leadership”.
As for Beckett, she complained
that too many of today’s public
appointments displayed “a political
bias”. And she a cabinet minister in
the Blair years.Political Sketch
THE MEGA AGENCYAngela Rayner gets
ready for the morning
media round in
Westminster. Left:
President Zelensky