Starmer’s patriotic rebrand doesn’t fool anyone

Since Harold Wilson stood down as Prime Minister 45 years ago, there have been 11 general elections contested by seven different Labour leaders. Of those, only Tony Blair has managed to win, which he did three times in a row. The roll call of the defeated reads Callaghan, Foot, Kinnock (twice), Brown, Miliband and Corbyn (twice).

As Alastair Campbell noted in a recent column for the New European, Labour’s record over the time span is lost, lost, lost, lost, Blair, Blair, Blair, lost, lost, lost, lost. Yet still we political commentators invite you to suspend your disbelief and suppose Labour is in the running. And still it is the Labour party’s activist membership that does this most readily.

Rather than ask themselves what it was about Blair which made him the singular exception, they send their latest standard-bearer for socialism out onto the field of battle to be pulverised anew.

That Keir Rodney Starmer has no chance of winning a parliamentary majority and very little even of being Prime Minister in a ‘rainbow coalition’ of leftish parties should be so obvious as to lead every Labour member to desist from any behaviour that will make his task more difficult.