News from Nowhere: Aftermath

• 

Now that the dust has settled on the results of the local elections which took place across England earlier this month, the time seems ripe to reflect upon their longer-term impacts upon the electoral prospects of the UK’s two main political parties and the authority of their leaders.

Following the recent suspension of one of his left-wing colleagues (and the internal party controversies resulting from that) and the ongoing attempts by the Tories to make political capital out of his plan to appoint as his chief-of-staff a former civil servant who wrote a highly critical report on Boris Johnson’s lockdown parties, Sir Keir Starmer was sorely in need of a PR boost.

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak has been faring even worse. His avowed efforts to run an honest administration have in recent weeks been dogged by a series of unfortunate events and revelations.

Those have included the resignation of his Deputy Prime Minister in response to the outcome of an inquiry into allegations of bullying, an increasingly public show of disaffection with his Home Secretary among more moderate Conservatives, and the continuing saga of his two most immediate predecessors’ antics: Liz Truss’s refusal to pay a bill for her personal use, while in office, of government facilities, and the investigations into Boris Johnson’s misleading statements to the House of Commons and his relationship with the man he appointed to run the BBC (who’s just had to quit that job).

On top of that, questions surrounding the completeness of Mr. Sunak’s declarations of his own financial interests are also currently being scrutinized by parliament’s standards watchdog.

His biggest problem however has been his failure so far to fulfil his pledge, made at the start of the year, to reduce the UK’s rampant rates of inflation.

If, after all, he could put the brake on price rises, the great British public would doubtless forgive him all his other faults. If he could only keep the cost of cheese, bread and sausages down, he could get away with almost anything.

He might even get away with receiving a police penalty for breaking Covid rules, or with receiving another fine for travelling in a moving vehicle without a seat belt (while making a video of himself for YouTube), or with maintaining his own right to permanent residence in the United States while serving in one of the United Kingdom’s highest offices, or with his super-rich wife claiming non-domiciled status to avoid paying tax in the UK, or with reappointing a Home Secretary less than a week after she’d been fired for security breaches.

(Ah, sorry, yes, it turns out he’d already got away with all those things.)

The fact that Rishi Sunak still looks significantly more honest and competent than the last two residents of Downing Street says rather less about his own probity and professional capabilities than it does about that pair of Muppets’ lack of those qualities.

One Conservative councillor blamed the dire election results on Boris Johnson’s scandalous conduct and on what he called his party’s “totally bizarre and inappropriate decision” to give the top job to Liz Truss.

He argued that Mr. Sunak came across much better than his two predecessors but that “his competence needs to shine through in order to fix” the damage that they’d done.

That evidently hasn’t happened yet.

The week before this month’s English elections, the Conservatives’ chairman had predicted that his party might lose as many as a thousand council seats.

Commentators in the media had observed that this was a higher figure than the Tories actually expected to lose, so that they might then say they were pleasantly surprised when it eventually transpired that they’d only lost seventy per cent of that number.

But be careful what you wish for – even when you think you’re just making it up. In the final tally, that projection hadn’t proven so far off the mark.

Indeed, it had been somewhat optimistic. The Conservatives ended up losing even more than their direst prediction: more than 1,060 council seats. The voters had certainly given them what the BBC’s chief political correspondent called “a thumping” at the polls.

Indeed, tragically, one Conservative candidate had actually died while awaiting the outcome of the count in her Derbyshire ward.

And Labour will have been encouraged by the suggestion made by The Observer newspaper last week that they’re starting to regain support in their former heartlands, parts of the country which had been swayed to turn blue in 2019 by Boris Johnson’s promises on delivering Brexit.

But, while it was a shamefully poor showing for the ruling party, the Tories may find some consolation in the fact that their losses led to gains for the Liberal Democrats and the Greens as much as for the main opposition party.

The Lib Dems racked up three-quarters as many new seats as Labour, taking 34 per cent of the total number of gains, while the Green Party took a fifth of the gains up for grabs.

That left Labour benefitting to the tune of less than half the seats secured by the increase in the progressive share of the vote.

This should remain a matter of concern for Keir Starmer, whose lacklustre leadership continues to hold Labour back from pole position as the shoo-in party for victory at the next general election.

The Labour Party declared the results represented a “clear rejection” of Rishi Sunak’s administration. It certainly still felt as if most people were casting their ballots against the dismally unpopular Tories rather than specifically voting in favor of Sir Keir.

That’s something he’ll need to change if he’s to look like a credible Prime-Minister-in-waiting in the run-up to the next national poll.

He’ll need to inspire the electorate with the fires of a previously unseen moral passion. To put it bluntly, he’s got to appear not quite so boring, so bland or so beige.

The charisma-free Labour leader must stop making the vertically challenged premier look like Tom Cruise, and start making him look like the overly zealous schoolboy that he is, a privileged little tyke playing games with people’s lives.

The results of these local polls, as elections expert Professor Sir John Curtice pointed out, proved to be “more of an expression of discontent with the government than enthusiasm for Labour’s alternative”.

That discontent with the Conservatives didn’t however spill over onto the front pages of the British newspapers in the immediate wake of the election results.

The headlines in the British press were, of course, instead dominated that weekend by the minor matter of the coronation of a new monarch. That must at least have offered a small scrap of relief for the diminutive and diminished figure of the nation’s beleaguered Prime Minister.

Within his own party, however, the recriminations had already begun. It was the fault of Boris Johnson or Liz Truss. It was the fault of Rishi Sunak himself, the man who’s been responsible for running the economy, as Chancellor and then Prime Minister, for most of the last three years.

Others blamed Brexit strategies for being either too weak or too strong.

Meanwhile, the official party line was to blame external geopolitical factors and global economic conditions far outside the government’s control.

But there was one thing on which pretty much everyone was agreed. The catastrophic meltdown suffered by the Conservative Party had very little to do with the overwhelmingly magnetic personality and popularity (or otherwise) of the leader of His Majesty’s Opposition, that curious political nonentity who calls himself Sir Keir.

And that’s a major problem for the man who considers himself a serious contender to become the next resident of Number 10 Downing Street – and a big boon for the fellow who’s currently there.

The electoral arithmetic currently suggests that, if a national poll were to be held tomorrow, Labour would be less likely to secure an overall parliamentary majority than to be forced into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats – or even (perish the thought) with the Scottish Nationalists.

The Tories are doubtless set to make political capital out of this possibility for the next eighteen months… Vote Labour to get a government you never voted for… Vote Labour to ensure the independence of Scotland and the disintegration of the United Kingdom.

Keir Starmer doesn’t at this stage look like an outright winner, and in this game, if you’re not a winner then you’re a loser.

And – because nobody votes for a loser – that’s the very last thing that anyone in politics ever wants to appear to be.

That’s why Donald Trump likes to throw that insult at his opponents. If you look like a loser, you’re most likely to become one.

Keir Starmer constantly seems to be on the verge of tears. Labour’s lamentably lugubrious leader hardly exudes public confidence – and therefore rarely inspires it.

One former Conservative minister this month depicted his party as languishing in a state of “resigned depression”.

But, as Rishi Sunak knows, if you act as if you’re going to win, then you might just do so. If you keep on smiling, then you might well in the end have something to smile about.

Politics is a game of presentation and perception. There’s a year and a half to go before the UK faces its next general election. For the country’s two main political parties, there’s still everything to play for, everything to win and very possibly also everything to lose.