Can things only get better under Starmer?

‘We are the masters now,’ I chirrup to my Holborn and St Pancras neighbours – misquoting Labour attorney-general Hartley Shawcross from 1946. I don’t mean I’ve decided to throw in my vote with the predicted Labour landslide: frankly, I’d rather give it to the candidate calling himself Nick the Incredible Flying Brick. What I mean is that as constituents of the incoming prime minister, we’re the heirs to Blair’s Trimdon Labour Club crowd in 1997. The world’s media will be all over us: we’ll be the first archetypes of the age of Starmer.

But how will we feel in five years’ time? Will our shopkeepers, small traders and restaurateurs have prospered for themselves while creating decent jobs for others – or will they have given up the struggle against punitive business rates and rising employment costs? How about Bow-Wow the poodle parlour and Metal Morphosis the piercing salon, both beneath my flat? In our ultra-urban ward of Starmer-land, will there be more social housing, more planning decisions favouring residents over developers, more dentists and GP appointments – and fewer drug dealers lurking in dark enclaves off Shaftesbury Avenue?

We’ll never know what the Tory counter-factual might have been. But what’s missing is any feeling that daily life, locally or nationally, can only get better under Labour the way it arguably did, for a while, under Blair. Sir Keir’s constituents have a duty to keep him humble by shaving his majority: neighbours, don’t dismiss Nick the Brick.

Going private

There’s a certain irony in the news that Hargreaves Lansdown (HL), the online stockbroker and fund supermarket that rose to be a FTSE 100 company as it helped popularise retail investment in the UK, is passing into the hands of private equity. If an agreed £5.4 billion bid by a consortium led by CVC Capital and including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority goes ahead, HL will be the latest leading stock to de-list – in a worrying trend in which collective lack of public investor enthusiasm and sluggishness in regulatory reform have left company valuations in London perpetually lower than those in US markets, and an open field for private equity to pick off the best bargains.