“I don’t like it – it’s too damn quiet.” That cliché from 1950s television dramas featuring beleaguered British expatriates in dependencies experiencing the incendiary process of decolonisation was, until this week, equally applicable to Labour’s election campaign. Under Sir Keir Starmer (even the knightly prefix was reassuring), Labour’s most feral beasts had been domesticated. The essential epithet routinely attached to Labour was “Changed”.
This was patently an attempt to echo the label “New” that was prefixed to Labour, like a rebranded soap powder, in 1997. It worked for the party then, so, slightly modified, why should it not work again in 2024? In fact, Starmer’s attempt at a remake of the Tony Blair movie was a poor sequel.
