That Starmer fella...

Cummings with the truth bombs:

Much of Labour debate looks like people deluding themselves about ‘mobilising the young’ so they don’t have to face the tough questions about persuading Tory voters. Clinton, Blair, Obama persuaded people who voted for their opponent last time around. Hillary did not. Even Corbyn was sometimes better at this than Starmer and sometimes even said popular things that were noticed!

Look at four simple examples:

For all Starmer's babble at PMQs, there is no summary of a coherent description of Boris’s catastrophic handling of the pandemic. The vaccine success and their failure to make progress has scared them so much they’ve abandoned even talking about the fact the PM killed over 100k while making jokes about it! And Starmer has bounced around so much and is now taken so un-seriously it’s hard to see how he could do this even if he were given the ammo by someone who knows what they’re doing.

It’s so basic it’s a sign of a total dud that he hasn’t even tried to have an economic story. Particularly when Boris has trolleyed around all year and deliberately ruined relations with his own Chancellor, paralysing the government’s own economic story! All he can say about jobs, investments, skills and so on is flat platitudes that leave no mark on the news, never mind public consciousness.

This connects to Starmer’s total failure over the collection of problems around supply chains and energy prices which has been telegraphed since last year. Any serious political project would have been all over this, developing arguments all year. The PM even made another truly terrible political blunder at Conference by babbling that it was ‘not my problem’ on TV a few times. A serious team would have immediately seen this opportunity and said — we’re going to make ‘not my problem’ his ‘read my lips’. There should have been videos all over Facebook hammering the message until the PM panicked and gave a clip ‘clarifying’, thus pushing the story on and ensuring the one thing the public remembered about the Tory conference was the PM saying the collapse of supply chains is ‘not my problem’ — which would go down very badly with target voters. Instead? Starmer either vanished on holiday too or is just so rubbish he’s invisible and couldn’t exploit the error.

Target voters are deeply concerned about violent crime. The Tories have been useless for a decade because they can’t escape the pull of the permanent bureaucracy and human rights activists. And in another terrible and telling blunder, the PM refused to remove the failed Met management even after, in their panic, they started tweeting to women to ‘flag down a bus’ if the police try to arrest them. It’s hard to think of a bigger open goal, a bigger opportunity to show target voters you share their priorities and values. What did Starmer do? He rushed onto TV to support the PM and the management! Almost all stories, including ‘big’ Westminster stories, are irrelevant to the polls. It’s almost all noise. That was a rare example of a moment that was not noise, where everyone was watching. He couldn’t see it and couldn’t exploit it. If you can’t see the biggest things you won’t see the smaller things.