Sir Keir Starmer’s latest list of politically expendable promises are more millstone than Ed Stone
“I’M not scaling back our ambition at all,” said Sir Keir Starmer yesterday as he scaled back his ambition again.
A weird shadow election campaign began this week, with both the PM and the man hoping to replace him tearing chunks out of each other in speeches that could be given on the stump.
Except there is no election yet.
And with Rishi Sunak telling TV’s Loose Women yesterday that we are all safe to book a summer holiday, it seems there won’t be for at least another four months.
But they’re off and both playing the same old tunes — with Sunak declaring you can’t trust Labour to keep the country safe.
For his part, Starmer is very pleased with his new New Labour-style pledge card.
Tony Blair published his five pledges for the 1997 election to great effect, and they’ve taken on something of Labour folklore ever since.
The sort of people who think The West Wing is an instruction manual rather than a mulchy TV drama love pledge cards.
You would have thought that would have died a death when some clown advising Ed Miliband in 2015 told him to chisel his pledges into a whacking great bit of limestone, but no.
Yet could Sir Keir’s latest list of promises to ditch when they become politically expendable actually have the reverse effect to Blair’s?
Is his lack of detail and woolly feel actually less of an Ed Stone and more of a millstone around his neck? Hear me out.
Many voters may well think that it’s tea in England and time for the other side to have a bat. But taking that sentiment for granted is very dangerous.
It’s the Ming-vase-over-the-minefield time of the electoral cycle, Labour are ahead and they don’t want to do anything to cock it up. So no one is really saying anything.
Whenever they do suggest something of note — like Starmer aides floating the idea that keeping Rwanda flights going in office might not be the most bonkers idea ever — they tie themselves up in knots.
I get it. There’s a paranoia in the Labour psyche that defeat has been snatched from the jaws of victory time and again.
The party’s history is littered with nearly men (and they’re always men in Labour).
But this is just taking the Mick — and the voters — for granted.
Starmer’s card is a masterclass in nothingness, barely a pledge made and less detail even than his promise of guiding “missions” last year.
The bonus sixth point shoehorned on the end to recruit an extra 6,500 teachers is the closest we get to a tangible promise.
Mandate of dust
The vow to create a Border Security Command sadly falls over on the fact there already is one, it is just called the Small Boats Operational Command.
“Delivering economic stability?” Cool plan, bro. How?
“Cut NHS waiting times?” Whoever would have thought of that?
Setting up Great British Energy? No one is quite sure what that one means but Labour’s Steve Reed admitted on the airwaves last night that it “may well” cost £82billion by 2035.
Blair promised in 1997: “No rise in income tax rates, cut VAT on heating to five per cent and keep inflation and interest rates as low as possible”.
Quizzed after his big speech, Starmer specifically refused to rule out putting up taxes, so no wonder that one didn’t make the cut. Also missing was any mention of endemic violent crime, the millions on out-of-work benefits, housing, defence, eye-wateringly high levels of legal migration et cetera. The Tories want to make this election about “borders, benefits and bombs”.
And they will spend the next six months, like the rest of us, trying to work out what Starmer really thinks on those trickiest of issues.
But the problems will not stop at polling day for Starmer if he really is going to try to remain this tight-lipped.
Labour aides say that’s the plan and not to expect a manifesto heavy on details.
If, as the polls suggest, he does actually win in the autumn, it will be on a mandate of dust.
“The soft Left are called the soft Left because they ARE soft” one battle-scarred veteran of the New Labour era told me recently.
Starmer is from that middle rump of Labour, and they will think they’ve got their man in if he wins.
A chivvy from the backbenchers here, a favour from No 10 there. Sops to the unions to soften the sharper edges of policies sprinkled about.
How long before it is public rows within the Labour Party that are setting the government’s agenda, rather than battles with the Opposition?
Pretty soon a rudderless Starmer project could lose its way without some actual policies backed by the public and at a PM’s disposal to say “you may not like this but the voters endorsed it”.
Without dipping his party’s hands in the blood of what he actually wants to get done, Starmer is setting himself up to follow his party, rather than to actually lead it.
Vagueness cuts both ways — he needs to lock in the detail to have any hope of getting anything done.
“Keep this card and see that we keep our promises,” read Tony Blair’s pledge card in 1997.
Chance would be a fine thing.
Here’s the skinny on Morgan
WHAT is about wannabe Downing Street svengalis and dressing like tramps?
First we had shoeless galaxy brain Steve Hilton running around No10 in shorts.
Then Dominic Cummings, who permanently dressed like he had slept in a skip and possibly had.
Rishi Sunak’s right-hand man Liam Booth-Smith is famed for his Danny Zuko-esque leather jackets and Austin Powers approach to shirt buttons and chest hair.
Now Sir Keir Starmer’s strategy guru Morgan McSweeney appears to have got the memo.
While everyone was suited and booted for Labour’s big event yesterday, he was lurking in the wings wearing skinny jeans.
“More like Morgan McScruffy,” huffed one sartorial source.
WELL here’s a sentence I never thought I would write.
Theresa May told a pretty good joke.
Breaking the habit of a lifetime to break bread with assorted Westminster hacks this week, the ex-PM turned the screw on her (multiple) successors and their many books.
First she suggested Liz Truss’s Ten Years To Save The West was better suited to the science fiction section of Waterstones, and “given her record, Ten Days would be more appropriate.” But May, above, saved her most brutal putdown for old enemy Boris Johnson.
Where should his upcoming memoir be placed?
“Current affairs.”