Labour can’t blame the Tories for their own sleazy mess
Being a tribal Tory, it can feel hard not to be smug watching this new government’s travails. Three months ago we were warning how abysmal a Keir Starmer administration would be. Already, Labour have underwhelmed even our gloomiest predictions. Any goodwill granted by a weary electorate has been wasted. Honeymoon? What honeymoon?
When Tory gloomsters predicted the wheels would soon come off Starmer’s government, we assumed it would be based on his ministers’ lamentable policies. Ed Miliband’s drive for rolling blackouts and higher bills by 2030, say, or Yvette Cooper’s determination to cancel the Rwanda plan with no substitute deterrent in place, with tediously predictable consequences.
Undoubtedly, Starmer’s government has already made plenty of costly mistakes. Picking a fight with the only segment of the electorate that reliably turns out to vote has been as unpopular as expected. But having piously fed the beast of media outrage in Opposition, Starmer has been thrown by it turning around and biting him on the bottom.
Lord Alli has switched from backing the Big Breakfast to providing a free lunch to the Cabinet. Before the election, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves seem to have spent more time jetting off to New York and picking out outfits than they did on planning for government.
But nobody seems to have done better for themselves than the man rechristened #FreeGearKeir. The Prime Minister has taken over £107,000 in gifts and freebies. Free hospitality boxes at Arsenal and Taylor Swift tickets. £20,000 for accommodation, £16, 200 for clothes, and an opticians’ bill that few would squint at. When he said he’d lead a government of service, Starmer missed off the self.
If it had been Boris Johnson indulging in such conspicuous largesse, there would not have been a horse high enough from which Starmer could have denounced it. Turning puce with moral fervour, the Prime Minister would have piously condemned the cardinal sin of Tory sleaze. Now it’s him in the firing line, he seems stumped. But if it’s poor form when the Conservatives do it, it’s just as bad for Labour.
In fact, it’s worse. Having made such a big deal out of planes, cakes, and wallpaper in Opposition, for Labour to now turn around and deploy the “everyone does it!” defence stinks of rank hypocrisy. The whole point of this government was that it was supposed to provide Change. Already, voters look from Labour to the Tories and find it’s impossible to say which is which.
But the two aren’t the same. The Tories were rightly punished for hiking taxes and losing control of migration. But at least they were putting their errors right. Labour will always be much more comfortable with hiking whichever levies or loosening whatever border controls the OBR requires to compensate for the pessimism and apathy Labour have already engendered in businesses.
Labour will continue to blame the Tory inheritance for any unpopular decisions they make. But they chose to give the union a £9 billion pay hike, just as much as they have chosen to let criminals early in their sentences, and just as they chose to benefit from Alli’s generosity. Voters understand Labour are batting on a sticky wicket. But they also won’t let them shirk responsibility for their mistakes.
Rishi Sunak’s Number 10 had plenty of failings. But at least the key figures got along with each other. Starmer’s Downing Street may be well-dressed, yet it already resembles Game of Thrones more than The West Wing, as key figures fall out over tanking poll ratings, salary disputes, and more leaks than a Thames Water sewage pipe. If they’re this bad now, what will they be like in five years?
I shudder to think. But it’s also why I can’t feel smug. Britain must put up with a Labour government, precisely because we Conservatives couldn’t convince voters to give them another chance. Every day that the public must endure Labour’s incompetence, bickering, and self-indulgence is another mark of Tory failure. It would drive you to drink, but Labour will soon have shut all the pubs.