In an extraordinary move, the leader of Scotland’s Conservative Party last week suggested that his supporters might do well to consider voting Labour in certain seats in a bid to block the Scottish Nationalists from power.

He said this tactical voting plan would represent doing “what’s best for the country” rather than for any particular political party. It was certainly a novel approach.

That surprisingly selfless attempt to bolster support for the continuing integrity of the United Kingdom was of course roundly rejected by his fellow Tories down in London.

But, aside from an unusual dose of political altruism, there might indeed appear to be a good reason to cast one’s support behind His Majesty’s Opposition. For one thing, the British Labour Party has been doing pretty well of late in the national opinion polls. They’re currently beating the ruling party by more than twenty percentage points.

In recent years, Labour has nevertheless become notorious for squandering any electoral advantage it may gain as a result of the increasing unpopularity of the Westminster government. Its perennial tendency to shoot itself in the foot hasn’t gone away, despite having lost more toes over the years than an especially careless pathologist.

In the run-up to next month’s local elections, it certainly hasn’t disappointed in its capacity to disappoint.

Earlier this month, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer took to social media to announce that, if elected, his party would “halve violence against women and girls." It wouldn’t just reduce it, mind you: he pledged specifically to halve it, not a fraction more nor a jot less.

This is doubtless a noble and necessary goal, but it is one which seemed to many people an impossibly precise commitment to fulfill, short of reducing the male population of the country by fifty percent.

Of course, that draconian policy option isn’t necessarily off the table. Mr. Starmer’s renowned ability to equivocate doubtless led to his advisors’ decision not to rule such a prospective gender cull either in or out.

His latest actual promise was accompanied by a video in which the former barrister droned on about the legal expertise he had developed in his previous role as the country’s Director of Public Prosecutions.

Mr. Starmer’s problem is not, however, that people don’t know he was once a successful lawyer. After all, he goes on about it often enough. His problem is that most people find him terminally uninteresting. His constant harking back to the remarkably dull glory days of his old career hardly helps with that.

He has also earned a reputation for being hesitant to make concrete policy commitments.

This new announcement doesn’t change that. It’s at once so exact in its ambition and yet so vague as to a plan for its execution that it consummately maintains his noted propensity to fudge his own agenda.

Last year, in a particularly vicious parliamentary scuffle, Boris Johnson had falsely accused Sir Keir of having, in his former career, failed to take action to prosecute a well-known pedophile. Members of Johnson’s own Cabinet had at the time sought to distance themselves from that maliciously vile accusation.

It later emerged that the then Prime Minister had been warned by his own advisors not to make those remarks. The resulting furor didn’t reflect well on Mr. Johnson and only served to exacerbate the collapse of his political authority.

Keir Starmer’s recent pledge to halve violence against women and girls came in the immediate wake of a remarkably similar controversy created by campaign strategists in his own party. It sometimes feels like these people never learn.

Labour’s PR team this month published a poster whose poor taste and questionable judgment were lambasted from both ends of the political spectrum and from all quarters of the UK media.

Alongside a photograph of British Premier Rishi Sunak and a facsimile of his signature, they asked the question, “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison?” They then supplied their own answer, “Rishi Sunak doesn’t.”

All around the nation, jaws dropped at the sheer stupidity of the claim.

When Boris Johnson had accused the Labour leader of neglecting to act to prevent the abuse of children, he at least hadn’t printed his scurrilous calumnies on massive sheets of paper and posted them on billboards all across the land.

It hadn’t helped that this Labour advert appeared the same week that news headlines had been dominated by the story of a child rapist who had avoided a prison term in Scotland after a judge had chosen to follow contentious sentencing guidelines issued by the Scottish Nationalist government.

That decision had been loudly condemned by politicians on both sides of the border. It didn’t look like it was Mr. Sunak who was going light on such crimes. On this occasion, the SNP would have made a much more obvious and effective target.

Pressed in a broadcast interview, Labour’s culture spokesperson refused to endorse the advert, but its shadow attorney general said she stood by it. However, as the scandal started to snowball, Sir Keir remained typically tight-lipped on the subject.

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He likes, whenever possible, to keep his head below the political parapet, and all too often proves the cliché that it’s easier to get a straight answer out of a tongue-tied boa constrictor than out of a lawyer.

Then, last week, as the outrage had eventually begun to die down, the Labour leader stirred it up again by declaring in an article in the Daily Mail that he would “stand by every word” of the attack ad “no matter how squeamish it might make some feel."

“Squeamish” was an odd word to choose, especially given that this was a prepared defense in print rather than an off-the-cuff remark.

One assumes that Sir Keir had intended to suggest that the advert might make some squirm in embarrassment or discomfort. But that isn’t what the word “squeamish” actually means. To be “squeamish” is to be prone to such discomfort, and thus to be morally fastidious.

Something might make you squirm, but nothing can make you squeamish. You’re either naturally squeamish or you’re not. That scrupulousness is an innate character trait.

Such moral probity certainly isn’t a charge which could be leveled at Mr. Starmer in this particular context. It’s as if his publicity people have decided to try to undermine his greatest electoral asset, his reputation for integrity.

Their hate campaign has since gone on to lay at Mr. Sunak’s doorstep the personal blame for crashing the economy and for recent massive hikes in interest rates.

This might seem unwise, as it is generally believed that it was the insane fiscal experiment conducted by his immediate predecessor (and bitter rival) Liz Truss, while Sunak himself was out of government – an experiment which he had railed against – which had provoked those woes.

Negative campaigning is likely to backfire when it makes claims it cannot clearly substantiate. In 1997, for instance, a Conservative poster infamously depicting Tony Blair with “demon eyes” had even played an unwitting part in catapulting Labour to a landslide victory.

Many voters had considered Blair to be too soft. So it didn’t hurt his campaign when the Tories suggested he wasn’t.

Quite incredibly, it’s now almost as if Labour’s own strategists are themselves attempting similarly to sabotage the public perception of their own leader as some kind of Mr. Nice Guy.

No, they appear to be saying, he can be just as dishonorable and dishonest as the rest of Westminster’s scurvy bunch. He can descend into the gutter to fight as dirtily as anyone. He’s a proper scoundrel, please believe us, truly he is. Cross our hearts and hope our consciences will die.

But, unfortunately for Mr. Starmer, their claims that the Tories are soft on serious crime has given his opponents a golden opportunity to resurrect suggestions that his own views have always lingered towards the limp, liberal, and permissive end of the criminal justice system.

The week that Labour brought out their ill-advised poster, The Times newspaper released footage of an obscure Tory MP bragging about how he could get around parliament’s lobbying rules to avoid disclosing gifts of generous hospitality from grateful businesses.

Also that week, Mr. Sunak chose not to sanction a minister who’d faced allegations of Islamophobia from a colleague in government.

That same week, the home of the former leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party was raided by police searching for evidence of financial irregularities, and her husband, who’d just quit a senior role in the party, had been briefly placed under arrest.

It's hardly then the case that the Labour Party on either side of the border doesn’t have any decent material to work with.

Their silly attack on Rishi Sunak wasn’t just petty. It was unnecessary.

The current government must be hoping that it represents only the start of a process whereby Labour chucks away all the goodwill that it’s managed, almost despite itself, to accrue in recent times, as the hopelessly virtuous Sir Keir endeavors to blunder and bore his way out of any chance of ever getting into Downing Street.

Keir Starmer might not be the most exciting card in the pack, but he’s always conducted himself in a way that might be characterized as statesmanlike. His campaign team, however, now seems determined to discard that image, and instead make him appear as capricious and mendacious as they can.

At this point in the electoral cycle, he needs to look like a Prime Minister in waiting. Sadly, the premier his people are modeling him on seems to be Boris Johnson.

The British Labour Party has a history of seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. Yes, it repeatedly tends to shoot itself in the foot. But today, under Sir Keir’s leadership, it’s hell-bent on shooting itself in the head. It’s faltering badly, even as it should be about to soar.