BY SEAN WALSH
Starmer’s demise is like the final minute of the spin cycle: never ending.
I suppose part of the fun in making political predictions is the post-hoc analysis of “why I was right when I said this would happen and it didn’t”. And knowing you can be serially wrong without any professional consequence.
There’s quite a bit of this about at the moment, much of it tied into Starmer eschatology. We’ve been living through this premiership’s “end of times” stage for quite a while now. So long it’s beginning to feel like that existentially distressing “final minute” of the washing machine cycle. The bit that always feels like a taunt.
According to political experts, Starmer became a dead man walking after the Rayner resignation, continued the zombie thing right through Mandelson 3, then was on borrowed time after miscellaneous humiliations unforced political errors, only to be given a reprieve which would allow him to stumble on until Christmas (still dead presumably), and is now expected to be forced out after the disastrous (and now doomed-to-be-hypothetical) results of the cancelled local government elections.
None of this has happened yet, nor is it likely to. The pundits, or political scientists, are applying Newton’s laws to a quantum paradigm. Politics has moved from post-truth to post-shame and it’s time to decommission the old modelling. What’s that? Can a prime minister survive losing his chancellor? Don’t be ridiculous. That’s like saying light can be a particle and a wave simultaneously.
Or going back further, our journalists would be happily situated in antique times, describing the cycles of the weather as if they were plotlines in a soap opera of the gods, gods whose motives, methodologies and mythologies are understood only by smart people such as themselves.
And so the punditry class is in spasm as it struggles to stay relevant. As tends to happen with paradigm shifts what are clearly falsifying events are interpreted as if they are of little significance.
Starmer isn’t going anywhere until he is given permission to get down from the dinner table by whoever it is that’s handling him. Andy Burnham has now found this out the hard way.
As I write this the Labour Party Nomenklatura National Executive Committee has voted (when they should have been in Mass) 8-1 against giving permission to the King of the North to stand in the by-election caused by the resignation of Andrew Gwynne. Mr Gwynne has stood down on health grounds, having developed a medical condition which causes him to wish death on the people who elected him as their MP (we wish him a speedy recovery, thoughts and prayers etc).
I don’t know about you but I feel cheated. For several reasons.
Firstly, a Burnham candidacy would have confirmed to even the most tribal Labour supporters that in the court of Labour politics everything is transactional, and that even the mayoralty of a (formerly) great city is just one more fungible unit in the economy of personal ambition.
Secondly, there is the squandered comedic opportunity. It is improbable that the former Health Secretary could have plotted a path to the leadership given the hidden variables and incalculable contingencies involved. I suspect that whatever plan he had would be less Francis Urquhart and more like one of those strategies employed by Compo, Clegg and Foggy in every episode of Last of the Summer Wine to turn a bathtub into a bicycle and ride it down a hill.
Third, we’d have had the aforementioned commentator class predicting the outcome of every stage of this process and its implications for the rest of us, getting it wrong, and carrying on with a shamelessness they’ve contracted from the politicians with whom they speak, dine and (in many cases) sleep.
There is no petty legalism, no Jesuitical real-life adjacent meretricious stratagem, so counterintuitive or plain evil that Starmer’s programmers won’t deploy it when useful. Which is not to deny the Prime Minister’s own moral dysfunctionality. Within the monochromatic world he inhabits he’s shown himself capable of carving out some very nasty shades of grey.
Starmer’s going nowhere but the pundits are now into sunk cost fallacy territory, so you won’t hear that from them.
The spin cycle goes on. Interminably.