I have spent the past week marvelling at the behaviour of our commentating class. They seem to have whipped themselves back into that familiar frenzy which must lead, inexorably, to the Prime Minister stepping down. ‘He has to go’; ‘The most incompetent prime minister of my lifetime’; ‘Things can’t go on like this’ – these were the general sentiments revolving around Keir Starmer even before his party’s thumping in last week’s local elections.
The problem is that some of us have a long-ish memory. So when people say the Starmer government is uniquely incompetent or ineffectual, a tiny flare goes off in my mind. Have these people forgotten Theresa May? Do they not remember the snap election of 2017 which was meant to deliver a ‘strong and stable government’, but which resulted in this country almost suffering a parliamentary coup enabled by – of all people – John Bercow? Are the people who claim we have never been so badly governed lucky enough to have overlooked the years when Anna Soubry was forever on the airwaves?
When people say Starmer is uniquely incompetent or ineffectual, a tiny flare goes off in my mind
Some of us also remember the Boris Johnson years. In my own view, Johnson ought to have been rinsed for tripling net immigration to the UK after promising that leaving the EU would enable the exact opposite. Instead, Britain spent months becoming acquainted with the investigations and character of Sue Gray. In parliament Starmer spent weeks forensically getting to the bottom of exactly where Johnson was when a cake arrived in the same room as him.
