Keir Starmer's Bad Luck
Superstition in politics is definitely a thing. Politicians, as a rule, have little clue about what politics is beyond advancing their careers, compromising to get policies through, scoring points and getting elected. It's a dynamic, shifting game for them, and one in which chance plays a leading role. Without an analysis to guide them, some fall prey to talismans and omens. Wearing the lucky outfit on election day, signs and portents of imminent good fortune or doom, the occurrence of coincidences, they are the politics equivalent a horoscope. But the nonsense of the tearoom culture does have consequences. If one gets a reputation for good or bad luck, like Boris Johnson and Starmer respectively, that can colour perceptions of how they're doing, which in turn impacts on the whispers reaching the lobby hacks' ears and the kind of coverage they receive.
Luck or lack of luck is a function of political opportunities and how they are utilised, they are not mysterious properties of unknowable fates. At Westminster, luck is unevenly distributed because the parties do not share a level playing field. The Tories enjoy the support of the press who, while in decline, frame the news agenda followed by broadcast media. And because they comprise the government, they get more air time than their Labour opponents. Johnson is a lucky politician, but it's a luck enabled by decades of soft press coverage and hostility to the alternatives. He has, mostly, played a strong hand well. Compare this to Jeremy Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader. He was unfortunate to lead without a significant hinterland in the parliamentary party, and to suffer ceaseless daily attacks by the same people who built Johnson up. Yet, despite this, Corbyn made his own luck. The barrage was constant, but on occasion he was able to sally forth and redefine the terms of politics by punting the unsayable and seemingly unsellable. He even managed this in the dying days of his leadership when Covid first made its presence felt. Here we had someone his enemies tried boxing in repeatedly, yet despite that was able to determine the direction of politics and set the weather.
By contrast, Starmer has been much more fortunate. The press environment has been benign for him. They helpfully buried the exposure of scabbing by party officials, and never trouble him about his calamitous mismanagement of the party and its finances, nor the gaping void where a political agenda should be. True, Starmer has had to operate during crises where people are more interested in what the government are doing than what the opposition are saying but the Labour leader hasn't even tried. He might have defined himself as a critic of Tory tardiness over Covid and, like his predecessor, made the case for and applied pressure to introduce new schemes or cover for gaps in government support. He did no such thing, falling in behind the Tories and offering them loyalty with the odd carping criticisms. Where he did make demands of the government, it was from a position of pre-existing widespread public support. And we're seeing the same over Putin's war. The people making the weather over Tory relationships to the Kremlin are the papers, with Starmer relatively mum - presumably in the name of a new union sacrée foisted on politics by Ukraine.
Consider the party's plans before Putin's tanks rolled in. Starmer had resolved to say nothing in the lead up to the local elections that might encourage people to vote Labour. And with public enthusiasm for taking refugees running at high levels, he completely failed to capitalise on that and make the Tories look mean-spirited - seemingly because Great Leader Keir doesn't want to be seen bowing to popular pressure. The minions who go scurrying off to fire text messages at their favourite columnists are making excuses for their boss. Starmer isn't unlucky, he's positively comatose. He has no idea about political leadership and what needs to be done, nor seemingly do those he listens to. It irritates the Labour right to repeat back to them the "any other leader" mantra they had fun with between 2015 and 2019, but in this case virtually any other Labour MP, regardless of their politics, would be doing a better job generating their own luck. When all is said and done, Starmer isn't unlucky. He's just incompetent.
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