𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

If you believe what a bunch of desperate-sounding Labour cabinet ministers are saying, you’d think that the whole country was crying out for Keir Starmer to stay in office. The country is sick of political psychodrama, they tell us. The voters want Keir to get on with the job and focus on their priorities, they insist. The last thing Britain wants is more churn at the top like we had under the Tories, they bleat. Blah, blah, blah… 

The trouble is, it’s a load of codswallop. The reality? Only 24% of voters want the Prime Minister to stay in office, and that figure comes from a YouGov poll last Wednesday. I can’t imagine the numbers have become much more favourable to Starmer since then. And how about an immediate general election? Do the voters want Labour to “get on with the job” like ministers keep telling us? Nope. It’s more drama the voters want. In fact, a parliamentary petition to “Call an immediate general election” gained more than a million signatures – so many that parliament will now have to debate it. Perhaps that’s not surprising when, according to Ipsos, 71% of us say Britain is going in the wrong direction.

Finally, what about the government’s poll ratings? They’re diabolical. If an election were held today, Labour would struggle to get a fifth of the vote, and Reform would have a big majority.

It’s transparently obvious Labour ministers protesting all this voters-are-sick-of-change stuff are merely gaslighting. And if those same ministers are wondering why the voters want the political soap opera to continue, even after all those years of Tory psychodrama, I’d simply say to them that the clue is in the words: soap opera.

Since the year dot, human beings have told each other stories that follow the same basic structure of an ordered beginning, a chaotic middle and a re-ordered end.

Think of any book, film or, yes, soap opera, and you’ll see that narrative in action. What makes the story of Titanic so fascinating? Simple. More than 2,000 people set off from Southampton, but then faced the chaos of an iceberg, not enough life rafts, that horrid business of who gets onto them and who drowns, and finally the tragic re-order, with only 700 or so passengers surviving.

Where is the Labour government in that story structure? It’s hit the iceberg and the boat is sinking fast. The captain is still at the helm but is about to go under. And the whole ship is on the verge of disappearing beneath the waves.

Once the chaos sets in to the extent that it has, the story cannot be reversed. Just as the Titanic became unsalvageable, so too has Keir Starmer’s leadership. The only way the story can end is with a new order. That means a new prime minister with a new team. And then, if that prime minister is any good, he or she will avoid the chaos of flip-flops, U-turns and endless broken promises, and the voters, in turn, will get their soap-opera kicks elsewhere.

Prime ministers hardly ever leave office of their own accord, at a time of their own choosing. Since the war, only Harold Wilson could claim to have done so, and even he was influenced by ill health. All the others left either because of election defeat or because their party gave them the boot. Sooner or later, it will happen to Keir Starmer too.

And once the chaos sets in, and the storyline can no longer be reversed, it’s better to get it over and done with.