“I’m completely in control.” As soon as a prime minister or party leader utters that claim, he involuntarily signals that the opposite is true. Prime ministers who are in control of their governments do not need to state the obvious: it would never occur to them to do so, since the fact is self-evident. Margaret Thatcher never made a statement like that, except perhaps in her last tormented days in 1990. Tony Blair never had recourse to such a protest. Today, coming from Keir Starmer, it unmistakably proclaims that, after just two months in office and with 411 parliamentary seats, he has lost control of his government machine, of his political narrative and of relations with the media and the public.
Scotland didn’t deserve a decade of SNP destruction
Scotland was pulled back from the brink a decade ago, but the national party’s campaign of devastation had only just begun
