Luckily for the Tories, Keir Starmer wasn’t obliged to resign over the beer and pizza Fiasco. This was the event that Angela Rayner conveniently forgot to mention that she had also attended. I think the Conservative party would be facing far tougher opposition if someone like Andy Burnham was the leader of the Labour Party.
Starmer is predictably quick to criticise at every opportunity, but the Labour Party has little in the way of credible alternative policies under his leadership.
Labour have struggled to criticise Johnson's government on policy because most of it is indistinguishable from their own. Their message has been we'll continue with everything the government is getting wrong now, but we'll do it more. And they wonder why they're not miles ahead in the polls.
One thing neither Starmer nor anyone else in the Labour party (or probably any party) has learned from Boris Johnson is the power of positivity. I'm sure a large part of the popular support Boris won was down to his positive energy and optimistic can-do attitude. In a sense, he has changed the game. We've had nothing but dreary managerialism since Blair. He understood the rallying power of positivity, although in him it was just a front.
In Boris, it's real. The trouble is, you have to turn enthusiasm into delivery and on the everyday things, Boris didn't. As vocal Boris critic Andrew Bridgen said, he has one thing in common with Churchill, in that he's a dragon slayer. When there's a big battle to fight, he thrives - Brexit, Covid, the war in Ukraine. When there are no dragons to slay and it's business as usual, he runs out of steam, and probably out of interest.
I think that Labour and Starmer simply don't get that. They believe their own narrative, that Boris has fallen from favour because of his fibbing and drinks parties. It's largely only Tory haters who would never have voted for Johnson anyway who obsess about his personal integrity. The people who actually voted him to office, including a huge number of Labour's own tribe, have turned against him because he didn't deliver what he promised and they couldn't give a toss about office parties and whether he did or did not know that one of his whips was a man-groper. On a personal level, like Lloyd George, he'd have got away with any amount of roguery had he delivered politically.
If the Tories can put up someone who will pick up the batten which Boris has dropped and look like they might actually be capable of delivering it, Labour would be dead and buried.
But Starmer and Labour don't understand that. All they offer is relentless negativity, doom, gloom, whining and personal attacks, opposing uncritically for the sake of it everything the government does because Boris and the Tories are evil so anything they propose must be bad. The People, they think, want relief from this wickedness, and a return to personal probity and managerialism, when in fact, they want what they voted for to be enacted.
In opposition you can be a sounding board for people's frustrations by relentlessly attacking the government on everything they do, but that isn't leadership. To become a credible PM, Starmer would have to suddenly discover his inner inspirational leader. Boris has that naturally and Blair made a convincing job of faking it, but I just don't think Starmer has it in him at all. He's a lawyer, not a leader. And I can't see it in anyone else in Labour either, nor for that matter, in Sunak. Truss? Who knows.
My fear is, no one will have the appeal to command a majority and whether Labour or Tories, we'll return plodding minority government and managerial decline. The only hope is that Truss will turn out to be a fire-cracker mini Thatcher who'll put a rocket under things, but I'm not optimistic. The alternative is a return to the May years.