Unlike Nigel Farage, Sir Keir Starmer has said remarkably little during this campaign. Starmer has stood several times next to a sign that reads “CHANGE” with a resting expression – referring to a man with irresistible hair lowering himself gingerly onto an inflatable haemorrhoid cushion. The most radical thing the Labor leader did last month was wear a very tight white T-shirt to look cool at the England game. But Sir Keir Starmer KC is definitely not “one of the boys”. He looked like a branch manager of a second-tier construction company whose wife ran off with the Greek paddleboard instructor and was desperately trying to “get back there.”
Sir Keir finds himself in an awkward situation. In two weeks’ time, he is poised to become the least popular candidate ever elected as prime minister but, oddly enough, the candidate with the largest Parliamentary majority in history. Depending on taste, it’s either surprising, overwhelming, or surprisingly overwhelming.
Rishi Sunak is very unpopular, with just 20 per cent having a positive view of him last month (71 per cent unfavorable); net “positivity score” -51. This is as positive as the dog stealing the sausages from Euro’s barbecue.
Starmer is better liked than his rival, but he is still very much disliked; 34 per cent have a positive view of the Labor leader and 51 per cent think he is useless (net favorability score -17). To put this into context, Sir Keir is roughly as popular as Ed “bacon sandwich” Miliband was at the time of the 2015 election. (As you may remember, Miliband inflicted his party’s most striking defeat since 1983.)
The coming landslide, then, is a reflection of “disgust with the Conservative Party rather than satisfaction with what Labor has to offer,” according to pollster Ipsos. The alarmed Tory hierarchy’s warning on Tuesday, “Don’t risk the socialism generation”, made me laugh bitterly. This column has predicted that by October 2022, Conservative voters will feel so used and abused that they won’t care if their party goes up in flames. In fact, it will be a firefighter whip round. (Wearing noise-cancelling headphones for fourteen years meant the Conservative government was deaf to its base, too arrogant and apathetic to listen and change course.)
So Starmer and Sunak are not catnip for voters; more fox poop. That wily hunting dog, Farage, is happy to roll around in it and create stink.
Under these circumstances, you can understand why Starmer might be reluctant to make post-election plans that might make people dislike him even more. (If the rumors about the gardens come true, all I can say is that he better install a cricket box to protect his lupines from 10 million pairs of pruning shears.)
The issue on which the Labor leader was outspoken, almost impassioned, was his refusal to use private healthcare. During the leaders’ debate on ITV, Starmer said he would refuse to go private even if he had a relative on the NHS waiting list for life-saving care. “No, I do not use private healthcare. “I use the NHS,” he said piously.
For a moment, the mask lifted and you could see the hard-left ideologue beneath the soft, managerial façade. This is a man who says he’d rather his family members remain suffering in “our NHS” than use his own considerable tools to alleviate their suffering (and shorten the queue of someone who can’t pay). The purity of socialist principles was not violated. What kind of person thinks like this?
It’s not something many Labor supporters identify with; 72 per cent told YouGov they would use the private sector to avoid long waiting lists if they could afford it. The left’s traditional tactic of kneeling before the sacred cow of the NHS no longer works. Nor is it to shame those (like Farage and Reform) who refuse to bow to this vast, hopeless, bloated bureaucracy with the addition of a subpar healthcare system.
Many families deposited or borrowed money to buy their mother or father a new hip. Many people have paid £200 for a scan to speed up the terrifying, embarrassing and deadly wait for cancer treatment. Too many people have had horrific personal experiences in the NHS, or seen their parents or friends suffer preventable deaths, to keep the faith as Starmer doggedly does.
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting struck a much more pragmatic note: Daily T podcast, he admitted that he considered going private when he recently found a lump. Streeting, who was treated for kidney cancer three years ago, said: “I was actually very scared. If the NHS can do this within a month I’m willing to wait. If it’s going to take longer, maybe I should go and pay for a scan for my own peace of mind; While I know this – especially if you’re Labour’s shadow health secretary – I know there’s a real risk of this turning into a media storm. . “But like many people, I think health is more important.”
What was Streeting doing other than criticizing his leader? Ideology is not more important than health, as Starmer claims. Our future secretary of state signaled yesterday that he was prepared to go further, saying the Labor government would buy thousands of private beds to “unblock” the failing NHS and care system. Streeting says there is “nothing Left-wing about leaving working-class patients to languish in pain because of middle-class Lefties’ objections to using the private sector.”
Boom! But this inhumanity, the metropolitan elite’s foolish worship of the NHS, is still a central tenet of the socialist religion and prevents our country from adopting the mixed-convict, high-functioning system that other countries accept for granted.
Starmer always boasts of his working-class credentials, citing his father’s always “excellent” job as a “tool maker”. The Labor leader explained that he had a very distant relationship with his father, who died in 2018; He is a “difficult and complex” man who “keeps to himself” and is “completely devoted” to caring for Sir Keir’s chronically ill mother.
If you dig a little deeper into his family history, you’ll find that Rodney Starmer actually ran his own independent toolmaking business, the Oxted Tool Company, until the 1990s. By all accounts the senior Starmer was a highly skilled, self-employed tradesman operating from a rented workshop on an industrial estate, rather than the horny-handed, blue-collar victim of the boss class his son preferred to portray.
(Starmer is also coy about his time at the selective Reigate Grammar School, which became private while he was still a student, but he was lucky enough to win a scholarship – exactly the kind of first-class academic education his government plans to deny. Children from similar backgrounds who are similarly on the rise How hypocritical he is by adding VAT to school fees.)
A slippery Starmer has repeatedly ruled out introducing taxes on “working people”. Asked yesterday what he meant by that term, he said “people who rely on our services and don’t have the skills to write checks when they get into trouble.”
Although Keir tried to disguise his own privilege by exploiting his “toolmaker” father’s working-class credentials, Starmer’s own father may not have met this description. Explain this if possible.
A few days ago Starmer suddenly claimed that he was not opposed to paying for healthcare. “I completely understand why people want to go private,” he said. But he doesn’t. Like many in the Labor Party, he is a prisoner of ideology who likes to feel he is morally superior to the rest of us, who should be punished with higher taxes because he is not “working people”, and who pays the bill by working.
That’s why Sir Keir is about to achieve the dubious distinction of being our least-liked, landslide-winning prime minister.
Personally, I find it inspiring that a man can leave the workshop and grow his own business. But after all, I’m a Conservative (I’ve had my time, I’m waiting for a new Messiah). Please don’t tell Sir Keir, but perhaps his father, a toolmaker, was also a Tory.
