We learned on Thursday of new polling showing support for Brexit among those who voted for it, has collapsed. A majority of its supporters now want to accept free movement in exchange for a return to the single market.
That change in opinion ought to mean Labour leaders no longer wake at night with nightmares of the Brexit bogeyman. But of course, it won’t. Let us be clear, dear reader: political cowardice is the only thing which stands between Labour and reality. They are terrified xenophobia will return. After the referendum they took a sworn oath among themselves never to mention Brexit again: sure it would mean doom in the election. Well, the election has come and gone and Labour won it, but they are still wedded to the old fears. Professor John Curtice, the country’s psephological supremo, almost bangs his head on the desk in frustration at Labour’s refusing to look at the figures.
Meanwhile, they blather about a reset. Other than diplomatic niceties and the occasional photo op, the three things they have to do are the three things they constantly and triumphantly reject.
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Rachel Reeves has been in Europe this week, but it is an odd approach to any kind of negotiation to declare beforehand that we are not open to compromise. Labour is still stuck with the view that, in the eyes of the public, progress can’t be achieved through seeking a common goal, but must be through some kind of British triumph. A zero sum game. That has always been our history, and any agreement which doesn’t end with a bloody nose is what our news media is pleased to call ”a typical EU fudge”. So we go in with a hard man’s swagger.
But at least the PM hides it. In insisting on Labour’s red lines, Ms Reeves is only repeating the prime minister’s position, but she lacks his subtlety. In fact it is difficult to see quite what Ms Reeves adds to Labour at the moment. Surely on Europe the prime minister expects more from his chancellor sitting on his shoulder and squeaking “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”
This week Ms Reeves publicly threatened the cabinet with her “iron fist”. She wants to be Aunt Agatha from PG Wodehouse, who chews broken glass and wears barbed wire next to the skin. But this fatuous ‘hard woman’ posture is becoming embarrassing. It is said Keir Starmer is ruthless, and he will know his party is becoming disillusioned. The government may be in for a long winter.
Cabinet shuffle in the new year, anyone? Unless things pick up, Ms Reeves may need some good friends in the months ahead.
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The prime minister has made it clear he wants to take serious decisions to turn this country round, and is much more interested in achieving that than looking for short term popularity. (Just as well, in the circumstances.)
It seems fair to take him at his word. Whatever the doubts, he seems an honest man. So it is frustrating that the government is making progress in many ways, but it is little reported. This is not just down to the news media: Labour seems squeamish about talking about it. Yesterday, East Anglia Byline published a story about how at last Britain’s policy is curtailing divergence. It is a positive step, but no Labour spokesperson has trumpeted it. They seem frightened to be seen doing the right things, in case it upsets the wrong people.
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“Too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.” This is the prime minister’s criticism of the civil service. These are not impromptu words. Somebody wrote them, thought them clever, showed them to others round a table and then Keir Starmer himself liked them and agreed to speak them.
They can only be seen as deliberately insulting. Was this intended to be a challenge to the civil service, albeit a crude one, or just a crass attempt to win populist favour? One factor common to so much of Labour’s policy under Keir Starmer is that it comes with the sound of breaking china, yet also the clear impression that all that cacophany was unexpected.
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A new Product Liability Directive from the EU hardly sounds the kind of thing to get the juices flowing, but that’s just the way they tell ‘em. This one confers on consumers across Europe much greater rights when something goes wrong because of a product you’ve bought.
Only of course, it doesn’t apply to Britain. Because we left the EU. One of the reasons put forward by the Leave campaign was to reduce red tape. Red tape being directives just like this one, so leaving the field open to manufacturers to cut whatever corners they like.
However myopic your political analysis, it is indubitably the case that the EU is the champion of the consumer. Which, of course, may tell us much of what really lay behind much of the demand that we should leave.
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A letter arrives this week from the Conservative Party, on Labour’s inheritance tax proposals on farms. “Farmers told Labour to think again! Policy experts told Labour to think again!” they claim, then adding triumphantly: “Jeremy Clarkson told Labour to think again!”
Well now, Jeremy Clarkson eh? Arrogant bigot and self confessed tax avoider told Labour to think again – yet they didn’t. Fancy that. The letter calls the initiative ‘Keir Starmer’s Family Farms Tax’, claiming it is aimed specifically at family farms when not even the NFU would make that up. They go on to claim “Labour MPs failed to stand up to Keir Starmer”. That does rather suggest the Tories are out to drive a wedge between a mis-firing government and its backbenches, and are looking to them for salvation.
This is quite the position to take. Does it make sense? As so often these days, one is baffled as to quite who the party sees as its core vote. For the Conservatives, lost and bewildered, there is no sacred flame to keep any more. The last flickers were extinguished by Boris Johnson.
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Perhaps the core vote is those who don’t eat lunch. “What’s a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps,” declares Kemi Badenoch (NW Essex) this week, in an observation intended to appeal to god knows who.
Last week, Pecksniff completely forgot to mention His Majesty’s loyal opposition: Ms Badenoch has already made her party so irrelevant that a review of the week’s politics didn’t notice they were there. There is nothing to say, because she has nothing to say. Her vapid contributions to PMQs have confirmed her as the lightweight’s lightweight.
This week – and in a desperate attempt at having an idea, even a bad one – she has appointed a new head of strategy. We shall watch, agog, but however apocalyptic the outlook, none of her rivals will have their eyes set on the leadership’s purple yet. The idea would be risible. The party is adrift on the sluggish tides of political indifference, dis-masted and with no control over quite where they will eventually wash up. They represent nothing and nobody any more. Even the racists have joined the rats in jumping ship for the odious attractions of the good ship Reform.
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The idea of Nigel Farage (Clacton) electorally sweeping all before him has its lazy adherents. But for all his populist ‘man of the people’ shtik, most voters wouldn’t be seen on the same bus as him. He is however increasingly popular with Tory rejects – those politicians who even the swivel-eyed loons among the residual membership have given the bum’s rush. The latest rumours involve recently rebuffed leadership candidate Robert Jenrick (noted here last week), and now the pewter-eyed Suella Braverman.
The story of her possible defection to Reform appeared in the Daily Mail this week, and its timing is intriguing. Ostensibly it is low key nonsense about her husband Rael out canvassing for Reform in Hertfordshire – as though the Mail snapper just happened to run into him in the Post Office queue in Baldock. But of course, the real meat and potatoes is in the tale of La Braverman’s coy coat-trailing about the careful rumour of her jumping ship “next year”.
The very idea was ritually rebutted by Ms Braverman herself, having successfully dangled the prospect in public, but for whose attention? What was the announcement (and its subsequent dismissal) intended to achieve? After all, they came from the same source: the Badenoch camp. My dears, what kind of treachery is publicly announced months beforehand? Here lies the mystery, to which we shall no doubt return.
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“One of the reasons given for the alleged decline of Great Britain and her approaching doom is that the Englishman has lost his love of money.” So claimed Beatrice Webb, doyenne of socialist grand dames in 1931. As a shrewd judgement on the movement of the tectonic plates of history, it has not aged well. But after all, what is a greedy and self-serving politician on the make to do? Elon Musk is worth $350 billion, and it’s said he wants to bung $100 million of it at Nigel Farage, courtesy of his fawning over Donald Trump as he plays at Dante and invents a new circle of hell.
But a Washington observer says the Trump team see Mr Farage as “an eccentric British fanboy who they indulge, but he hasn’t been of much use and think he just wants to bask in reflected glory”.
Sitting snug in your socialist integrity, dear reader, this kind of moolah has no appeal – Beatrice was right about you, anyway – but spare a thought for those weaker souls. ‘Fanboy’ Farage sits at the feet of the great benefactor as chief sucker-up, but surely there must be space for lots of little suckers-up too?
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Our colleague JJ Jackson paid an unexpected visit to the Muckrakers this week, and conversation in the saloon bar inevitably turned to Thurrock, on whose discrepant civic culture he is the world’s leading authority. The story so far… The council set up an anti-fraud organisation which appeared to impersonate the police – a criminal offence – and had done so with the apparent connivance of the police themselves. This organisation has also been awarded a government contract. Meanwhile the council had given half a billion quid of the taxpayers’ money to a bloke they met down the pub… And hardly anybody is interested, not even the voters.
What criticism has sneaked out concerns the lack of transparency, both about mislaying £500m and for having a fraud team that was not subject to public scrutiny. Now it seems the council, and it is this that drove the estimable Jackson to buy another round, has decided the best option is to discuss these problems in secret – without public scrutiny.
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We learn that Liz Truss features in a documentary by the Wall Street Journal, offering a “timely warning about the dangers of power being exercised by unelected and unaccountable individuals and bodies”. Was this a cheeky reference to Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Journal and much of the west’s media besides? Or possibly to the unelected and unaccountable individuals who are presently ganging up in the Lords to prevent their voting rights as hereditary peers being removed?
Apparently not. The Truss mantra is “beat the Blob”, the fanciful dark forces of the deep state she conjures up to avoid scrutiny of her performance as the worst prime minister ever.
Pecksniff remembers no sinister (if impeccable) cabals of Sir Humphreys. It would hardly be necessary. In any case, if they could scarcely breathe for laughing at the idea of Jim Hacker becoming prime minister, imagine how they would have choked on their Armagnac at Liz Truss.
No. No conspiracies. As far as your diarist recalls, Ms Truss was brought down by a green salad. 🥬
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The extravagantly-named Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty (Huntingdon) has made an interesting and critical contribution to BlueSky, the social media platform of choice these days for those on the centre left. He claims:
“Engagement is actually minimal and almost exclusively, sneeringly, left-wing, which makes it interesting to see what self-righteous centrist-dad criticism will be flung at you but that’s it. There’s no debate to be had because everybody holds the same opinion.”
For those who have made the switch, their reason is to avoid that almost exclusively sneeringly right-wing engagement which quickly degenerates into abuse. But he does have a point. Pecksniff is also about to dip in a toe, and the platform’s present adherents can seem irritatingly sanctimonious – always a tendency of the left and, as your diarist never tires of pointing out to colleagues, probably the reason we lose so many elections.
As Mick McCarthy, that preceptor of Portman Road, once explained to critical journalists: “Opinions are like backsides, we’ve all got’ em. But it’s often not a good idea to show ‘em off in public.”
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Thanks go to Karl Whiteman, JJ Jackson and Celina Błędowska.
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