If someone had told the Prime Minister after his landslide election victory what a mess he and his party would be in just a year down the line, he wouldn’t have believed it. Nor would anyone else. But delegates at the Labour conference in Liverpool can’t work out whether they’re at a funeral or a battlefield. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, they do at least know they’re at a perilous crossroads.
The latest YouGov mega-poll, suggesting Keir Starmer’s set to lose nearly two-thirds of his MPs, mostly to Nigel Farage’s Reform challengers, could hardly form a more grisly backdrop to the occasion.
Hence the widespread recall of Winston Churchill’s famous phrase: ‘Action this day.’
And with the Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham ever more overtly setting out his stall as the man to save the day, the focus is shifting ever more tightly on him.
But no one’s under any illusion. Starmer isn’t going to just roll over and hand him the keys to Number Ten. Meaning that any leadership contest would mean months of civil war before a victor’s declared.
Step forward one of the oldest sayings in the political lexicon. Divided parties don’t win elections. And, given that Labour’s already looking like a loser, arguably this is the last thing they need right now.
Against that, Burnham’s immense popularity oop north is earning him the epithet: ‘Vote whisperer.’
No question, having scurried over the years through a number of ideological hoops since his days as a government minister, he has hit on a clearly identifiable left-of-Starmer platform. And learned how to sell it.
No question also, Sir Keir all too manifestly hasn’t got that knack.
He is doing his level best in Liverpool, trying to wow the fans with his newly stiffened spine and more pointed pointy sticks jabbed at opponents, particularly Nigel Farage.
But it’s one thing grabbing, maybe, the attention of the sort of people who go to party conferences, quite another getting the millions of folk who aren’t really interested in politics to take a blind bit of notice.
Take the government’s hard-hitting measures over recent months on behalf of the nation’s underdogs.
Research shows that only a quarter of us even know about the beefing up of workers’ rights. Only a fifth have heard of the better deal secured for renters. And hardly anyone’s spotted the toughened up taxes on big tech.
Basically, the lesson to draw from such findings is that just delivering the goods isn’t enough. You’ve got to scream it from the rooftops. And one thing Starmer really isn’t very good at is screaming. About anything.
Compare and contrast with Farage, who’s up there with Winnie when it comes to weaponizing the English language.
It’s said that after Churchill delivered his rousing ‘we shall fight on the beaches’ speech he muttered to colleagues on the front benches: ‘I don’t know what with, maybe broken bottles, we haven’t got anything else.’
It didn’t come to that, of course, but the story’s indicative of how words can capture imaginations, even if they don’t necessarily stack up.
And in the case of Nigel Farage, currently tipped to be our next Prime Minister, hardly anything he says stacks up. The only question is how much of that he knew all along.
Take his one-man mission throughout the summer to drag far-right thinking into the mainstream. And in the process making overt racism perfectly acceptable.
Remember, he more than anyone else managed to spook the then Prime Minister David Cameron into holding the in-out EU referendum, ultimately getting rid of the short-stay Europeans who’d been plugging gaps in the Labour market.
Did it never occur to him that the PM who got Brexit done, Boris Johnson, would plug those selfsame gaps, notably in healthcare, construction and tourism, with long-stay migrants from the rest of the world?
Then again, did he care? After all, the so-called ‘Boriswave’ did give our Nige another stick with which to beat the established parties, and thereby draw yet more attention to himself.
He followed all this up with his wheeze of sending asylum seekers, including women and children, back to places like Afghanistan to face god knows what the brutally misogynistic Taliban might inflict on them.
And then, last week, came his generous offer to not just to abolish indefinite leave to remain for new arrivals to the UK but also to deport hundreds and thousands of those who’ve already got it.
When much of this blueprint fell apart on even fairly rudimentary scrutiny he fell back on his Transatlantic orange chum’s laughably nonsensical claim that migrants were eating the swans in Royal Parks.
Admittedly, Farage did struggle a bit with Donald Trump’s every bit as nonsensical suggestion that women who take paracetamol during pregnancy risk giving their babies autism. But the prez was on a roll anyway at the United Nations.
He did raise eyebrows however, declaring so soon after cuddling up to us in his state visit that UK was after all a bit of a basket case, overrun with foreigners and imposing Sharia law in London.
The Mirror newspaper doubtless spoke for millions of us in its coverage, under the one-word headline: ‘Deranged.’
Millions of others might not have seen it that way. But polls do show that a clear majority of Brits have Trump down as the gibbering idiot dribbling into his pint in the corner of the pub, steered well clear of by almost everybody.
Maybe a word of warning there for Farage not to get too close.
But maybe also a reminder to Starmer that appeasement tends not to work. Even the whopping wad of US dollars that all his smarming managed to garner might not be all that it seems.
It will be spent on huge tech bro data centres. But the employment they’ll generate will fizzle out as soon as the construction work’s over, as from then on they’ll be powered by AI, not people.
And as for Starmer’s sop to Reform, the digital ID cards he has in mind in part to make it harder for illegal immigrants to slip into the black economy, Farage himself is opposed, on civil liberties grounds.
All the more reason, many top rankers in government are arguing, to call the man out. For a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman, a rogue and a scoundrel. Basically, to really go for the jugular.
Not as if it’s never been tried before. Literally, from time to time, in the good old days.
Back then, the Lib-Dem leader’s calls for less heated debate, or Jeremy Corbyn’s pleas for ‘kinder, gentler politics’ would have been strictly for wusses.
After all, seventeenth century disputes between the rival factions had a knack of getting settled via duels. Witness the Whig Lord Mohan’s trials before the House of Lords. In both cases for murder.
In the end he was taken out by the Tory Duke of Hamilton. And, incidentally, not greatly grieved. When his body was taken to his wife all she said was: ‘Oh he’s got all that blood over my counterpane.’
Perhaps then now, as then, to show a bit of mettle? To put your dukes up, Keir.
Watch Peter’s report at peterspencer.org
Peter Spencer has 40 years experience as a Political Correspondent in Westminster, working with London Broadcasting and Sky News. For more of his fascinating musings on the turbulent political landscape, follow him on Facebook & Twitter.