Starmer's Struggles Continue
On How Proximity To Success Can Blind Us
One of the things that I harp on a lot is that proximity to successes doesn't mean that someone is responsible for the successes - as I wrote in shitting on Lynton Crosby earlier this week. But, in the aftermath of two events on Tuesday, this point needs to be made again.
We'll start with the Tuesday Champions League match between Chelsea and Atletico Madrid, where Chelsea won 1-0 and probably should have won by 2 or 3. I watched the game intently, cheering for the Blues, partially because of my love of Mason Mount and partially because they're Lak's team, and I'd like to think he wants good things for my beloved Manchester United too. (Well, at least, when they aren't playing each other, which they are this upcoming Sunday.) Watching the game, I was thoroughly unimpressed by the performance of Thomas Tuchel, the newly hired Chelsea manager. The team selection was a mess - seriously, no Chilwell on your backline, no Kante in the middle, and Mount playing as a wing instead of just playing him at the top of a fucking proper 3-4-3 - and the set pieces were lacking imagination. They could have won by 2 or 3, but that was because of the piss poor nature of Atletico's performance more than anything to do with Chelsea's coaching. And then, I read that it was a masterclass from Tuchel.
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The second event of Tuesday was yet another poll showing a widening lead for the UK Tories. The latest Tory lead was a 6% lead from Redfield And Wilton, a 3% increase on their last poll. And, I'm now reminded that Keir Starmer was supposed to give a speech that would set out the new Labour agenda on economics, provide the vision I was calling for. That speech, minted as a relaunch, was a nightmare, a continuation of every vapid bit of triangulation that has come to mark the Starmer era.
I'm thinking of Starmer, who is well regarded in the press and by North American Liberals glad to see not-Jeremy Corbyn running the Labour Party. And, for a while, he rode the path to electoral successes - or, at least, some polling leads - by being inoffensive and triangulatory. But now, it's failing, and people are starting to ask why. To me, the answer is pretty simple - Starmer isn't very good, and he never was.
Starmer is a politician built in a lab to appeal to posh liberals in London, and it will probably put Wimbledon and Finchley and Chingford in play, depending on how the new lines are drawn before the 2024 election. He is affable, respectable, and unerringly polite. A barrister and a public servant - hell, he is a literal fucking Knight - Starmer is the kind of person who has very strong opinions on what wine to pair with dinner. What he doesn't have are any concrete ideas on how to make Britain a better country.
Oh, sorry, he has one - British Recovery Bonds, a way to get people to "invest in the recovery," although how this bond is any different than the time my Mother bought me a $100 Canadian treasury bond at my birth which we ended up using to buy the original Wii 10 years later is unclear to me. But still, people think Starmer is good, mostly because he is the kind of liberal who knows what all the forks and spoons are for at a charity dinner. He is affable, personally kind and reasonable by all accounts, and he is not an anti-Semite, which is an improvement on the last guy. But, the problem is, Starmer polled well in the summer months not because he was leading, but because he was just there, much like Thomas Tuchel on Tuesday.
When you're Tuchel, it doesn't really matter if you abuse the concept of defence and criminally misuse your best player by needlessly making it hard for him to create in open space by putting him on the wing, because you manage Chelsea and you can still win a bad game. Even at the worst moments of the Frank Lampard era, they still won games, and even legitimately impressive ones. You can fail and get bailed out - and much of Chelsea's best stuff came when Mount just decided he was going to stop playing on the wing and move, without the ball, inside (where he should have been the whole time, I mutter to myself).
Starmer doesn't have the luxury of other people bailing himself of his failures in the same way that Tuchel does, because the Labour bench is fairly bereft of real talent. The exodus of talents - and no, I cannot believe I'm about to refer to Ed Balls as top tier Labour talent, given my contempt for the man in 2015 - like Balls, Burnham, and Harman from the Labour frontbench over the last half decade has deprived the party of fail safes for shit leaders, and now they're fucked.
There is no way out of this, no easy fix - Starmer has to become someone who is willing to make decisive action and actually risk pissing people off in search of greater victories. The timid triangulation needs to become forceful vision, and there is no evidence from either Starmer's time as Brexit spokesman or as Leader that he can become someone different. Maybe he has a Jon Ossoff style resurgence, but that was rare to see in Ossoff. Starmer has been seen as successful because he was in close proximity to some amount of success, but that doesn't mean he caused it. Looking back now, it seems clear that an adorable small child would have had the same polling numbers as Starmer against the useless Tory government, especially after the Dominic Cummings trip scandal and the Exams Fiasco. Now, without the Government actively committing seppuku on a daily basis, Labour is floundering under feckless Keir. They might recover, but unless Starmer steps up his game, we all need to consider that he isn't the guy who can lead them to government - and remember, that just like Thomas Tuchel, proximity to success doesn't mean you caused it.