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The Mandelson scandal placed Starmer’s premiership in its most precarious position yet. In an attempt to control the fall out and to express a renewed sense of purpose, Starmer has sacked three members of his team: Morgan McSweeney (Chief of Staff), Tim Allan (Director of Comms) and Sir Chris Wormald (Cabinet Secretary). Wormald’s replacement is set to be Dame Antonia Romeo, despite allegations of bullying and misuse of expenses – behaviour typical of the modern civil service, as analysed by Nick Busvine for Briefings for Britain in 2020. Despite the sackings of Blairites like McSweeney and Allan, Jonathan Powell remains: his national security strategy has been marked by a deference to China, with the approval of the super-embassy, the Chagos deal and the silence over Jimmy Lai’s imprisonment.
McSweeney’s departure, more than any other, has seemed to open the way for Starmer’s government to lurch leftwards. The Prime Minister is set to announce that ‘the Britain of the Brexit years’ is no more at the Munich Security Conference, signalling his desire to realign with the EU. Paired with the reversal of Brexit, or ‘dynamic alignment’, is the government’s commitment to Net Zero. Starmer and Miliband are currently negotiating Britain’s rejoining the EU’s internal electricity market. Meanwhile at home, the government’s tack leftwards can be witnessed in Bridget Phillipson’s ‘gender guidance’ for teachers which will allow pupils to use their preferred pronouns in class.
A couple of weeks ago Michael Gove wrote a critique of influential human rights lawyers. This week’s Divisional Court ruling to uphold Palestine Action’s challenge to the government’s ‘terrorist organisation’ proscription (made last June by Yvette Cooper) might be seen as part of a similar problem. The government’s proscription was ruled ‘disproportionate’ by a High Court judge. In The Spectator, Richard Elkins shows how the Human Rights Act has been weaponised to undermine parliamentary government.
On Wednesday, Sir Jim Ratcliffe sent the mainstream media into a frenzy after an interview with Sky News. He remarked that ‘the UK’s been colonised [by immigrants]’. Ratcliffe referred to the spike of immigration since 2020 (known as the ‘Boriswave’) and its burden on state healthcare. As co-owner of Manchester Utd it sent the football commentariat into sanctimonious hysteria. It also provoked the Prime Minister to call on Ratcliffe to apologise; ‘Britain is a proud, tolerant and diverse country.’ This follows events this week which include a 13-year-old Afghan knifing two pupils at a secondary school in Brent and the arrest of two Islamic extremists who were planning to massacre Mancunian Jews.
Lastly, on Saturday Rupert Lowe announced that his pressure group ‘Restore Britain’ is now becoming a national political party. In response, Ben Habib has merged his ‘Advance UK’, which did not get very far, with Lowe’s outfit. It is a harder-edged, more explicitly Christian nationalist party with particular emphasis on ‘remigration’ and British national identity. Much of its momentum, like Lowe’s popularity, is predicated on Twitter activity. Whether this will make any electoral impact is yet to be seen. It is nonetheless significant that a further right alternative to Reform has emerged, potentially complicating the British right.
Blog
Is Sinn Fein Deceiving us on the Windsor Framework? By Graham Gudgin
Sinn Fein now have the First Minister’s post in Northern Ireland plus three other ministries including the Department of the Economy. This article identifies an apparent attempt to disguise the relatively poor performance of Northern Ireland’s exports over the latest twelve months of data and speculates that this may be to avoid any suggestion that the Windsor Framework (which they strongly support) is not working.
Media
Tim Shipman in The Spectator: ‘Authority is like virginity. Once it’s gone, it’s gone’: Inside Keir Starmer’s downfall
Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph: Miliband’s devastating net zero fanaticism is driving Britain over the edge
Key Points
‘How do you build a project around someone who doesn’t have any politics and hates the very idea of a larger project?’ asks one of those who had tried to define Starmerism. ‘Advisers advise and prime ministers decide, and this prime minister doesn’t want to decide anything. Keir has never met a policy that he had a natural view on. That’s why he’s capable of thinking that ID cards are terrible and then ID cards are wonderful and must be compulsory and then that they mustn’t be compulsory.’
That is from Tim Shipman’s first draft of the history of the Starmer government (linked above). Aside from explicit quotations and minor anecdotage, Shipman’s essay confirms much of what everyone knows about how Starmer has run No. 10. His political sense is poor, the direction of travel all over the place and figures like Hermer or Powell are ‘siren voices’ in the Prime Minister’s ear.
(One of the more interesting aspects of Shipman’s essay is the following about Powell and Chagos: ‘It can be revealed that Starmer also wobbled over the deal to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius and pay £35 billion for the privilege – an issue on which his soul-deep belief in international law trumped political common sense. ‘There was a very difficult meeting between the political team and Jonathan Powell,’ an insider recalls. After a focus group in which voters reacted with incredulity to the details, ‘there were loads of people pushing to know why it was necessary, and all Jonathan would say was that it was in the interests of national security’.)
And yet – Starmer remains! Is it just by dint of good fortune that Starmer has survived the Mandelson meltdown and the countless other near-fatal choices he has made? Doubtless, Starmer is a poor Prime Minister in the sense that he can’t manage his Commons majority properly (it was for this that Sir Robert Walpole is acknowledged as the ‘first’ Prime Minister). But he has managed to either sink or neuter his rivals within Cabinet: Rayner has the Stamp Duty cloud hanging over her, Streeting has had to grovel after being associated with Mandelson and Miliband is being kept close at hand as he drags Britain into the throes of the EU again, via Net Zero.
In other words, there is an arguable case that Starmer isn’t as ‘bad at politics’ as Shipman’s sources might suggest. And while he lacks a ‘philosophical worldview’ he has clung on to power. No matter how ignominious or tactless he is as a politician, Starmer might just be a better practitioner of the dark arts than the easy, ridiculing commentary has led us to suggest.
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