Events!

But then of course there’s Events … Mandy, Trump, who-knows-what.  Starmer already has a long list of self-serving one-liners to fend off the ‘known unknowns’ …

That was C@W last week: and right on cue, Events have struck.  Was Healey’s resignation really an unknown unknown?  No: for several weeks past, meejah political correspondents have been reporting that all was not well with the Defence Investment Plan and that the Cabinet was badly split on the issue.

Given that right now it looks for all the world big enough to be a Final Nail, letting it erupt like this is a capital strategic error on Team Starmer’s part: it was foreseeable; they should have made sure it was covered[1].  I’m sure we’ve all met situations where someone, or some organisation, fatally loses sight of just how big some fairly obvious potential banana-skin really is[2] – and it’s not pretty when they step on it.  Not quite the same phenomenon as Nicholas Taleb’s “picking up pennies in front of the steamroller“, but there are some family resemblences.

So now, we must assume that Burnham will campaign even more explicitly as the anti-Starmer insurgent, however implausible.  Farage, presumably, will campaign on “it’s Labour that is the problem“, to be reinforced in the days to come by lurid stories of toxic Cabinet proceedings that the press will be happy to furnish as they get extensively briefed by all the self-interested parties involved.  And let’s see what ‘line’ TS comes up with to fend this one off – that’d earn someone his bonus.  Or is it just too late for yet another last-ditch defence?  

ND

_______________

[1]  It seems they were preoccupied “wargaming Andy Burnham’s next moves“

[2]  In my first commercial employment, I watched in horror as a really good manager I worked for came badly unstuck in that manner.  Fortunately, this life-lesson came very early in my career.  It was a great relief, two employers later, to work for a firm that operated on the maxim: the bigger the (potential) issue, the better the team we deploy and the more attention we give it.  It’s truly crazy when a firm draw up a list of 10 issues, and commits one tenth of its resources to each with no thought to the relativities.  Or worse: when it gives 30% to the squeakiest wheel, irrespective.