Call it a trial run. With parliament still on recess (what better way for MPs to endear themselves to the country than to award themselves an extra day off over the new year break?), Tuesday was as good a time as any for Keir Starmer to test-drive his latest pitch to voters. If it went well, so much the better: he would be ahead of the game. But if parts fell flat then there would be plenty of time to put them right in more important speeches ahead. Such as ones where more than a handful of people outside Westminster were listening. Yet even though the stakes couldn’t have been much lower, the Labour leader was leaving nothing to chance. The set was the full Liz “Gloriana” Truss, with two large union jacks for a backdrop. If it took draping himself in flags to prove that he – and the Labour party – were patriotic then so be it. Keir didn’t care if he was laying it on a bit thick. He would bathe in red, white and blue if necessary. Whatever it took. Starmer started as he meant to go on by celebrating the country we live in. Remembering how lucky he – and we – are to be British. We have the Queen. The NHS. The rule of law. The Queen. Musicians. Universities. The Queen. The BBC. Fashion. The Queen. But it wasn’t unpatriotic to suggest there might be one or two areas where there was room for improvement. Over the course of the pandemic, the British people and the opposition had done the decent thing by giving the government the benefit of the doubt. But the government had betrayed that trust by thinking the rules didn’t apply to them. Not just the serial liar and party organiser Boris Johnson. The betrayal went far deeper than that, into a Tory party that had been in power too long and took the country for granted. So replacing the prime minister with Truss or Rishi Sunak would make no difference. What was needed was a new Labour government. So far, so good. But then it all got a little vague. After bigging up the achievements of Atlee – he even dared mention nuclear weapons, Wilson and Blair governments – the best that Starmer could offer was a new social contract. If we worked hard and obeyed the rules, Labour would give us security, prosperity and respect. Which was fine, as far as it went. But it didn’t quite feel as substantial as founding the NHS, Nato, the Open University and the national minimum wage. He also promised to make Brexit work. Which could have been a little rash as no one has, as yet, come close to even the vaguest hint of how they intend to do that. Starmer was more assertive when it came to the media Q&A at the end. After grabbing the moral high ground by pointing out the government’s failure to prepare schools for the new term, and that it had only been down to Labour votes that it had been able to implement plan B, Keir took on both Corbyns. First Piers and the anti-vaxxers, then Jeremy. He made no apology for having pretended to sign up to the Corbyn masterplan only to ditch it once he became leader. He was in the business of winning elections rather than being in opposition. The public had had their chance to vote for Jeremy’s manifesto in 2019 and had given Boris an 80-seat majority. Enough was enough. And no, Johnson was most definitely not the sort of prime minister who should be knighted. The speech hadn’t been quite as polished as Starmer might have ideally liked but it had been more than a decent marker towards the next election. And it was certainly enough to spook the Tories into bringing forward the Downing Street press conference by a day. Boris couldn’t take the risk of Starmer grabbing all the headlines on the evening news bulletins. Or for Keir to be seen as the only leader working. You could tell that Johnson didn’t really have anything new to say at the presser because he took an age saying it. That’s one of Boris’s most telling giveaways. His bullshit and waffle meters work perfectly in sync. Just about the only part of his government that does. So what we got was a lot of hesitation, repetition and deviation. We have a prime minister whose only discernible current talent – other than as a party host – is to talk complete bollocks. His main message was that Omicron was very serious but not so serious for him to need to do much about it. Rather, we should accept that his hands are tied by the libertarian maniacs on the right of the party who couldn’t even accept wearing a mask on public transport. So, as the chances of them approving anything more than that was nil, and imposing further restrictions for a second time with Labour votes was politically unacceptable, we were stuck where we were. Sticking to plan B and keeping our fingers tightly crossed.
Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance alluded to problems with this approach but stopped short of spelling them out. So it was left to the media. Johnson talked of hospitals not getting overwhelmed, when at least eight trusts are already operating on an emergency footing without the staff or protective equipment to treat their patients. “Um, er, just get boosted,” he said. He hasn’t even realised that the vaccination programme has stalled. Here we were. With an incompetent prime minister who was making decisions for entirely the wrong reasons. And we would just have to sit tight and hope it somehow turned out for the best. Starmer must have been watching and thinking maybe he had less work to do on his speech than he had imagined.