As the two remaining Conservative leadership candidates continue to hurt each other, there is a natural temptation to think that Labor leader Keir Starmer must be sitting pretty. As Rishi Sunak has particularly railed against the almost certain winner Liz Truss, describing her economic strategy as “not moral… and not conservative” and claiming he is bound to lose the next election, Starmer is certainly entitled to a quiet pool. he smiles on his family vacation.
After all, it cannot be disputed that, in general, the downfall of one major party leader is a battle honor for the other, implying the attainment of a certain level of authority. Tony Blair saw four opposite numbers: John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, while Theresa May saw none and almost made Jeremy Corbyn Prime Minister.
But if Sir Keir is any good at reading the political game, and the jury is still out, then he will know he is in for a very bumpy period. The great political Eye of Sauron has almost finished his current Tory project and his sights are about to be set on Labor issues.
Past experience tells us that a new prime minister almost always has a honeymoon period with the electorate. Even the turgid May and Gordon Brown were stratospherically popular at the start of their first terms in office. So it is unlikely to matter that Liz Truss is, as she says, “not the most successful of communicators”, or even that she takes office in the midst of a painful economic crisis, as long as she sets out attractive plans. to address it. And an emergency budget must do just that.
Indeed, there is already polling evidence to suggest that the days of frothy double-digit job polls are coming to an end. Three weeks ago, the polling website Politico, which gives the best indication of general public opinion, showed Labor holding an average ten-point lead. This has already dropped to seven points and the trend line is clearly against Labour, while a YouGov poll this week found it has dropped to a single point with Labor on 35 per cent, five points to below the share won by Corbyn in the 2017 general election.
Ratings of party leaders are also turning against Starmer again, with polling by Redfield & Wilton Strategies this week finding that Truss has already overtaken him in the question of who would make a better prime minister and is on track very ascending Moreover, with a Truss prime minister offering the prospect of bolder approaches to illegal immigration, the Northern Ireland Protocol and tax cuts, there is a good chance he will quickly win back disenchanted voters in the center right in the Conservative voting column.
If everything was a big dory in the field of work, this might not present much of a problem. Starmer could only tell his party to keep calm, get away and wait for the winter energy bills to land with a thud on the mats. But the problem for him is that the mood towards him within his party is already very turbulent. Top leaders continue to report against him over his personal performance, while the party’s left is furious after he was elected leader largely on a set of socialist promises radicals that he has now abandoned.
Truss will present Starmer with an entirely different challenge from an ailing Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions when. It’s only one weak performance away from a full-blown crisis. And yet, curiously, what is most likely to preserve it is Truss’s early power.
Now that the Fixed Term Parliaments Act no longer exists, the timing of a general election is once again a prerogative of the Prime Minister. It is quite unlikely that Ms Truss would run for an autumn election to win her a mandate of her own from the voters; if it went wrong, his prime ministership might not even last 100 days, but it is not impossible. Labor MPs will have noticed that there is a certain wildness in his gaze that suggests unpredictability.
And yet, if Labor ditched Starmer and plunged into a protracted leadership contest, it would risk the possibility of Truss calling a general election while it was a rudderless mess with literally no one to sell voters as first minister in waiting So Starmer will almost certainly go ahead, underwhelming large swathes of the electorate and with little to suggest he is someone who can turn 200 Labor seats into more than 300 in one fell swoop.
The great Tory Willie Whitelaw once joked that Labor was “around the country stirring up apathy”. For most of his tenure at the helm of the party, that description has also fitted Keir Starmer. He came off pretty well from his small part in the defenestration of Boris Johnson, but he’s about to do it again.