Boris hubris halted by Starmer in Batley and Spen
It’s Saturday morning, and the leadership contest for control of the Labour Party is underway. Although Sir Keir Starmer’s supporters say that their man will not resign following the party’s defeat in the Batley and Spen by-election, it looks like only a matter of time. He appears done for, fixed in the public imagination as a loser permanently falling short, destined to be another of those leaders of the opposition who fails to establish himself as a credible potential Prime Minister.
The Labour leadership contenders – Rayner, Burnham, Cooper, Long-Bailey, Richard Burgon, Mickey Mouse and Basil Brush – issue hypocritical statements thanking the doomed leader for his service but implying politely that he is in the departure lounge. Labour’s defeat in Red Wall Hartlepool has been followed by this latest defeat this week in a seat hitherto thought relatively safe.
Starmer’s supporters try to claim that he must be given time because he is less than two years into a four mission to overhaul the party and – don’t laugh – return it to power. This morning, that plea for patience looks deluded when the party 36 hours before suffered the ignominy of a crushing defeat in Batley and Spen, a by-election the opposition should never have lost to a sitting Conservative government. The new Tory majority of 3,323 stands as an indictment of Starmerite failure.
The far-left, the Corbynite hold-outs, are gleeful about the collapse of inept Sir Keir’s leadership. From the other end of the Labour spectrum, former Prime Minister and three time election winner Tony Blair pops up on BBC Radio 4 at 8.10am acknowledging the size of the hole the party is in, and reminding everyone is that the last Labour leader to win anything was called Tony. Trade union leaders appear on air too to condemn the listless, lightweight Starmer approach. This defeat in Batley and Spen spells the beginning of the end. Labour is in turmoil. This is a weekend of Labour carnage.
Only, none of this happened or is happening. And that is what matters here in terms of political momentum. It’s Saturday morning and rather than Starmer losing the Batley and Spen by-election on Thursday, he won narrowly. Labour’s candidate Kim Leadbeater was the victor, just. The sister of Jo Cox, the former MP who was murdered during the 2016 Brexit referendum, is the new MP for Batley and Spen. A relieved Starmer, looking revived and even happy for once, hailed it on Friday as a victory for hope over division. “Labour is back,” he said, perhaps optimistically.
In the aftermath of the result there has been much Tory quibbling that misses the point. Yes, the Labour majority in the by-election was small, but that matters not a jot. If the Tories had won by 323 votes as Labour did that would have been portrayed – rightly – as a disaster for Starmer, unleashing that weekend of carnage I described earlier. As it is, Labour won by 323, and that makes all the difference.
Politics often comes down to these victories or defeats by small margins that change perceptions and arrest or alter the momentum. This looks like one of those cases. Although Labour should have been at no risk whatsoever in a seat such as this, in a profoundly nasty by-election with ex-Labour rabble-rouser George Galloway running against Labour, it was at serious risk. The troubled Labour machine had no choice other than to put everything into winning. It won, giving Starmer a little space and dishing the lunatic far-left longing for a return to Corbynism, the project that almost ruined Labour.
For the Tories, the result is a jolt after the hubris of recent months. The Prime Minister, Boris “vaccine rollout” Johnson, was sent to Batley and Spen several times to campaign in person, a sign that the party’s strategists thought victory was already assured.
Instead, something went wrong with the Tory by-election machine, again. The “get out the vote” operation didn’t work, again. The party didn’t see the defeat coming in former safe seat Chesham and Amersham, in the South East, a few weeks ago either. These shortcomings worry Conservative MPs.
Tory headquarters – CCHQ – is a mess, say critics, depleted organisationally after the general election victory of 2019. Oodles of money is raised by moneyman and Boris pal, Tory party co-chairman Ben Elliot, Britain’s most self-confident man and nephew of the Duchess of Cornwall. It is said Eliot fancies himself as an MP and a future Prime Minister. If so, he should not hold his breath.
The co-chair model does not work and will not work any better when pre-pandemic politics becomes more competitive.
Elliot’s co-chair is Amanda Milling, an elected politician who is given second tier status at party HQ. It will be interesting to see if the Prime Minister spots the growing danger of a failing machine and realises he needs a big hitter in the cabinet in CCHQ, a bigger beast to take control of the machine.
Sir Keir Starmer remains an opposition leader in considerable trouble, facing a Tory majority in the Commons of 80. Despite this week’s win, Labour is not much closer to a revival in the parts of England it needs to win, and in Scotland, the place that used to provide the bedrock of a majority and much frontbench talent, Scottish Labour is still depleted despite a change of leader in the Holyrood parliament. But Starmer has survived a storm that would otherwise have been blowing him away, destroying his leadership, this weekend. That didn’t happen, Tory momentum has been arrested and a degree of competition, healthy in a democracy, has been reintroduced.
The assumption by the Boris gang and his fans that his formula would accrue ever increasing gains in England turns out to be wrong. As Daniel Finkelstein put it, Boris is no longer advancing. The commentator Dan Hodges identified what this means early, in the hours after Labour’s by-election victory. Campaigning acts do go out of fashion in politics, eventually. Putting a tousle-haired Boris Johnson on a forklift truck and getting him to put his thumbs aloft for the cameras has a shelf-life.