The Tories’ enemy is now clear for all to see. The party must equip itself for the fight

Keir Starmer
Keir Starmer

Donald Trump says that Sir Keir Starmer is “very nice” and “popular”. Without denying the pleasant personal qualities of our new prime minister, I venture to suggest that the sage of Mar-a-Lago is behind the curve of British opinion. The polls do not say that Sir Keir is popular. Indeed, for someone whose party has just won the largest parliamentary majority since the Second World War, he has become quite decidedly unpopular, quite unusually fast.

One reason for this is the abolition of the winter fuel payment. In my opinion, he is right that the payment has always been a wasteful electoral bribe (though he would not put it thus). But by targeting it alone and so early in his premiership, he makes people scrutinise him more unfavourably.

Thanks, in part, to the crazed net-zero policies of both parties, all voters – and especially the elderly, because they are the most often at home – face the prospect of ever-rising energy costs. So the abolition of the winter payment hurts more.

People also notice that its abolition pays for – or rather, contributes a fraction towards – enormous pay rises for junior doctors and train drivers. Two powerful groups of “key” workers are being rewarded for their selfish strikes. Voters begin to think Sir Keir’s heart might be in the wrong place.

The next reason for unpopularity has been the revealed munificence of Lord Alli, and the light it has shed on the court of King Keir. Again, the new government deserves more sympathy than it is getting for the need for busy politicians, especially campaigning ones, to get a little help from their friends. But – also again – it seems blind to how this looks. Like some secular monk, Sir Keir takes vows of service to others – intending to contrast himself with the sleazy Tories – while wearing a suit given him by a multi-millionaire.

And when Sue Gray, the former civil service head of “Propriety and Ethics”, having improperly and unethically defected to be his chief of staff, demands a salary larger than his own, Sir Keir gets furious with the journalists who ask him about it. “I don’t believe my staff should be the subject of political debate like this,” he told the BBC.

Though Prime Minister, he seems not to know that it is the first duty of our elected Parliament to question how and why public money is spent. In this questioning, it can be highly relevant to focus on the pay and rations of the most powerful public servants. And when, as at present, Parliament is not sitting, it particularly falls to journalists to ask the questions. Sir Keir’s tone of moral outrage in response reminds me of Jeremy Corbyn’s notorious dismissal of the idea that Labour could possibly contain anti-Semites. How dare anyone suggest that his associates are not pure and holy?

Then comes this week’s Labour conference in Liverpool. Although rhetorically a reasonably competent effort to raise Labour’s head above the recent squabbles, the Prime Minister’s speech was really quite haughty.

Not for him the “noisy performance” (think Boris, think Farage) of populism. All that was “mere glitter off a shirt cuff”, he said, sounding like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. His little anecdote about revisiting the Lake District incognito centred on the fact that the police, not he himself, were driving his car. Nor was he good at spreading the joy he briefly invoked. “We will turn our collar up and face the storm,” he declared.

In his speech, Sir Keir advertised the new “duty of candour”. We all have a duty of candour in our dealings with others, of course, but, as is typical of Labour in general and Sir Keir, the stern legal eagle, in particular, this is seen as something to enforce by legislation (“a law for Liverpool”).

Without the help of any law, Sir Keir did in fact fulfil his duty of candour in his speech. He revealed how he sees the world. He set out the measures Labour had already set in train – planning reform, creating Great British Energy, ending Ofsted one-word judgments, starting a National Wealth Fund, stopping no-fault evictions, re-nationalising the railways, the “levelling up” of workers’ rights and several more. All these measures increase the power of the central state over the citizen.

That, in Sir Keir’s candid view, is a good thing in itself. He has wrenched from its original setting the famous Leave slogan “Take back control”. Instead of referring, as it did in the Brexit referendum, to control by the British people, it now, in his mouth, means control by the British state. “Markets don’t give you control – that is almost literally their point. So if you want a country with more control,” you must embrace this Labour government, he told his audience. Such control is antithetical to the freedom he ignores and the economic growth he says he craves.

At the Conservative Party conference next week, for the first time since the then prime minister Harold Macmillan announced his resignation from his hospital bed in 1963, there will be no Leader’s speech. Instead, the four candidates to replace Rishi Sunak – Badenoch, Cleverly, Jenrick and Tugendhat – will be separately interviewed.

I hope they will all have studied Sir Keir’s speech before they appear on stage: it clarifies the difference between a socialist and a conservative view of the world. The would-be Conservative leaders urgently need to define this difference. Unfortunately, it has been almost effaced by most of the past 14 years in which the Conservatives have governed the country.

Let me take an example whose sheer triviality is telling. I have before me the new “Kept Bird Registration Form – Keeper of less [shouldn’t it be ‘fewer’?] than 50 Poultry or Other Captive Birds”. This four-page document insists that you give the address of where the birds are kept, their “Country Parish Holding (CPH) number”, map references, your own details and the number of birds, their species, such as chickens, ducks, ostriches, psittacines and cassowaries, and the purposes for which you keep them, eg. releasing for racing, display, “growing pullets up to point of lay”. Even if you have but one solitary hen, “you are breaking the law if you do not register”, which you must do by Tuesday.

It is argued that registration is made necessary by recent bird flu. Serious though bird flu has recently been, it seems reasonable to believe that this extension of the criminal law is excessive, and more than reasonable to believe that, in a country where goodness knows how many people keep a few chickens, ducks or geese, enforcement will be preposterously expensive.

I cite this example for two reasons. The first is to show how minutely invasive regulation has now become. The second is to remind people that this silly little measure – and no doubt hundreds like it – was invented under the Tories. Just like Labour now, they lamentably failed to stand up for the capacity of ordinary citizens to make the right decisions in their own sphere of life.

From the very particular to the almost abstract: one of the words favoured by Tory ministers in recent years has been “equality”. Yet, when seen as a goal of economic policy, equality is a word only a socialist should use. The conservative words that fit that space include fairness, opportunity and prosperity.

If the Conservative Party cannot voice and renew those conservative modes of thought, others will.