'Dear the Labour Party: it's time to let Keir Starmer off the leash'
Dear the Labour Party: we get it, really we do. You don't want to frighten the voters, or tell the Tories what you'll put in the election manifesto in case they nick it.
You've had good reason to spend the past three years playing a cautious game of poker in which you've never bluffed, never gambled, and folded every time things look a bit expensive.
And that's worked - it's got you to a place where you are the government-in-waiting, Scotland's just seen a 20% swing and you're 20 points ahead of the Conservatives who have destroyed their own election chances more utterly than if Angela Rayner had bottled them in a fight outside a flat-roofed pub.
But that's enough of that.
"Leave it Ange, he's not worth it"Rishi Sunak will only let the country vote when inflation is below 3%, the polls turn in their favour, or he's forced to by law, whichever is the later. In any event, the ballot boxes will be dusted off within a year, and you're entering the final furlong with a leader you're frightened of.
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You're frightened he doesn't have enough of a personality to tickle the tootsies of voters like Boris did. You're frightened he's not as nerdy as Rishi, not as likeable as Angela, with such a boring backstory it could be used to wean people off Nytol.
When the Tories announced they were scrapping environmental protections which stopped housebuilders polluting our rivers, you told Keir to button it and say nothing. The Tories would only use it to say he was anti-housebuilding. He put his size 10 down, and insisted on coming out hard against the policy.
You were right - the Tories did call him anti-housebuilding. It made a headline in the Daily Mail, zoiks. But all the country remembers is that the Tories are pro-pollution, and seeing as Mail readers are more likely to live next to the river, Keir wins on points.
And if you had let him do that - encouraged him - supported him in word and deed rather than watch it through your petticoats waiting for him to fail - he might have emerged from it in the public mind as pro-housebuilding in the right places, which ticks everyone's ballot paper.
"Has anyone here got dancing experience?" (Getty Images)Because you're frightened that he's not enough, in an era when personality gets people elected and evicted, you're sending out the Shadow Cabinet to offer the voters an ensemble, a stronger and more competent prospect when it comes to working out who takes over from the carnival of horrors currently rotting at the back of the Westminster fridge.
And that's good. It makes sense to allow people to get to know Wes Streeting, Jonathan Ashworth, Bridget Phillipson, and to become reacquainted with some of the faces from the New Labour era like Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Emily Thornberry. The last thing anybody wants is to look at a new government like it's week one of Strictly Come Dancing, and everyone's saying "Who's that? Are they in Corrie?"
But you and they are treating it, not as a job interview, but as running interference to make up for Keir's perceived failures. To take the pressure of expectation off someone the focus groups say is a bit grey, gooey, and indecisive.
Ask yourselves: why do they think that of a man who has run two massive organisations, successfully? Who has firm moral principles that put him head and shoulders above each of the Prime Ministers he's faced at the Despatch Box?
I'll tell you - it's because you're projecting. As a party, you're undecided about him, and it's poisoning the way you let him do his job. The caution, the changing of minds, the umming and ahhing - it's a reflection of the one thing that might still mean Labour doesn't romp home next time. You don't know if you want to.
All right, he's not as rock-solid-certain as Jeremy Corbyn. And thank gawd for that, because granite-hard ideology meets public life in the same way a rock meets a windscreen.
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He's lacking the Blair razzmatazz or the Johnson bonhomie. Again, praise your gods, because it was as empty as their souls.
What Keir's got in spades is authenticity. He's not a liar, a charlatan, or a snake-oil salesman. If the Tories have just made it impossible for him to build HS2 because they'll have sold back all the land by the time he takes over, he's going to be honest about it. But for pity's sake, if Sunak has got the point where "he's just decided, f*** it" and he'll outlaw smoking, with a party that forms the entirety of the British cigar customer base, then it's time to let Keir do Keir.
There's no down side. Either he is grey and wishy-washy, flip-flops and still wins the election, or he takes a stance, flashes some electoral ankle and wins more bigly. Treat him with confidence and you'll find the confidence. There's no way he can lose now, even if he puts on a blond wig and starts talking about pork markets. The man could go full John Major, eating peas in his underpants on Question Time, and he'd still end up leader of the biggest party in a hung parliament. Anything better than that, and he's got a landslide.
The country is crying out for someone whose confidence isn't entirely misplaced. Who is mostly-normal. Who drives a Toyota rather than a Sikorsky. One who smiles when something good has happened, rather than because he's licking his eyeballs.
I've met Keir only a couple of times. I expected him to be dull and indefinite. Instead, he was dynamic and determined. Stop filling him full of your caution, your indecision, your nail-biting anxieties about whether any of you are up to this and whether you can carry it off if he's not more Tony. If you don't stop being indecisive, the country will be undecided too, and we don't want to be: we want to believe.
The problem isn't Keir. The problem is you, the Labour Party - you need to get over yourselves, and stop holding your leader back. Let him off the leash, and let him lead.
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