Who is popular today?

On the all too rare occasions when it has achieved office in the past, Labour has done so with a broad appeal attracting diverse groups of voters
No political party has a divine right to exist. If they did, Britain would still be ruled by the Whigs. There have been a lot of doomy prognostications about Labour’s life expectancy since the big set of elections that alarmed many people in the party with the thought that the calamitous 2019 performance might not be the lowest they could go.
A trauma was then turned into a crisis by Sir Keir Starmer. The test of a leader’s calibre is not whether he or she can avoid difficult moments. Those come with the job. The test is how they address the difficult moments. Sir Keir commended himself during his early period in charge as someone who came over as professional, serious and measured. He was none of those things when he responded to the results with a panicky, amateurish and divisive reshuffle in which he appeared intent on diminishing his deputy, Angela Rayner, only to end up giving her a mantelpiece-size set of grandiose-sounding titles. That fiasco has left Labour MPs dazed, confused, aggravated and much more doubtful as to whether their leader has a strategy for turning things around. He may be able to repair his reputation: look at the rollercoaster career of Boris Johnson to see how modern politics likes a comeback story. For now, Sir Keir’s authority is badly weakened and with it his capacity to carry his party with him. No bout of existential angst would be complete without an attention-seizing contribution from Tony Blair, Labour’s most electorally successful leader, weighing in to tell the party to “change or die”. Continue reading...