Mis-steps by party leaders becoming costly

Six months ago with Starmer still in office, I mused that we’d already seen peak Reform but not yet peak Green.  Since then, the cards have pretty much been dealt for the rounds leading up to the next GE, and mis-steps are becoming increasingly costly.  

Reform is the easy one: Chancer Farage has made a complete git of himself over the summer and is now left with the purely negative, reactive politics he made his name with over those long wilderness years.  He knows what he hates: this often coincides with what a lot of other people hate: he can sometimes get traction.  But he’s reduced to rejoicing in other leaders misaligning themselves with those hate-themes – or rather, what he perceives as their misalignment.  And he can be wrong, because clever political operators can sometimes flip these issues on their head: on a good day, both Burnham and Polanski are good enough communicators to be capable of reframing things in a confident and positive manner that can change the mood noticeably.  Like many a sports team that peaks fruitlessly between World Cups, Farage has had his top-of-the-rankings period and it’s over.  We all remember how UKIP and the Brexit Party ended in turn: and he’s so given to petulance, with so little bench depth, there’s even the possibility of complete melt-down.  The wonder is that so many – not least on the left – reckoned he was nailed on as next PM.

The less technicolour mis-steps are to be seen on the left.  After a stellar honeymoon, Burnham seems (IMHO) to have failed to use that period to cement a truly solid platform for what’s coming next – namely, some very stormy political weather indeed.  When you see a man ad-libbing on the Man City affair as grotesquely inappropriately as that (did he also think Jimmy Saville did some good stuff for charity?), you realise you’re dealing with an amateur of highly fallible instincts.  (Starmer of course was another, albeit of a very different variant.)  Charm is a great asset, and we’ll see a lot more of it in the months to come: but it doesn’t ultimately deliver when it’s the only diamond-tipped tool in the box.  Let’s see how Burnham navigates the rocky shallows between now and the New Year.

As for Polanski, well, maybe I should wait for the by-election result on Friday.  But however that falls, we can confidently record that he, too, is revealed as being incapable of parleying superb communications skills into what’s needed at the top – again, because there’s no adamantine core of genuine political judgement.  In his case, that wasn’t ever really in doubt: he was just an object of fevered wish-projection from the left, on (proportionately) an even bigger scale than Burnham still is.  Polanski’s performance over the past two weeks has been really poor – celebrity by-elections are no easy trick to pull off – and last week’s Green party conference may very well go down in history as a pivot-point back into shrill, sad obscurity, for him and his hopeful-but-hopeless party.

Amusingly enough, in the context of widely lacking political judgement, Ed Davey can actually seem quite a pro!  In a basically irrelevant way, he really is – much good may it do him.  Anyone being offered good odds on Badenoch might want to take them.  In a nation of highly conservative people of all political hues it is my unwavering conviction that, far from being utterly doomed, the Conservative Party – like Labour – is a genuinely enduring institution.  Let the derision follow!  But that’s what I think.

ND