Johnson aces elections, Starmer loses them — but both are flying blind

Spatial disorientation is a deadly cause of air accidents. If you can see the horizon out of the cockpit you can stay out of trouble. In cloud this falls apart. Your senses tell you that you’re flying straight and level. But you could be banking or entering a spin. You have no visual reference. This illusion leads to what we pilots call the graveyard spiral.

The French have a word for this giddy sensation: deboussolé. This is how Keir Starmer must feel. He looked disorientated, almost shellshocked on the morning after Labour’s crushing defeat in Hartlepool.

Voters like to use by-elections as a stick with which to beat whichever party they’re fed up with at the time. A by-election doesn’t usually signal a trend. Mostly it’s an electoral fit of pique. But this feels different. It feels big.

The rout in Hartlepool was at the worst end of expectations. The landslide victory for the Tory Ben Houchen in the former industrial heartland of Tees Valley’s mayoral race with 73 per cent of the vote, is frankly astounding.

After the drubbing Labour suffered in 2019, all this bodes ill for the party that built its foundations on its commitment to and the allegiance of the working classes.

Jill Mortimer, the newly-elected Tory MP for Hartlepool, by her own admission, has spent more time in the offshore tax-haven of Cayman Islands than the town she will now represent. Hardly the obvious choice for a town rated the tenth most deprived in England with possibly the highest unemployment rate in the country.

If Labour can’t persuade voters in Hartlepool that they stand a better chance of being lifted up by voting for the candidate with the red rosette, many more previously staunch Labour seats in the north are in mortal peril.

The big picture is shifting. So are politics at a granular level. After the Brexit earthquake and the party’s catastrophic defeat in 2019, Labour’s failure to see this suggests a level of spatial disorientation, of disassociation, which is acute. Its compass is spinning and it can’t get back on course.

But Hartlepool is not the whole story. This week has thrown up a complex picture which merits careful thought, rather than despair on the Left or triumphalism on the Right.

Britain remains a country that is profoundly unequal. The challenges thrown up by the pandemic and by Brexit, not least the threat to the Union, are best tackled by a country at ease with itself. Instead, we have a country subjected to cultural antagonism when what is needed is reasoned political discourse.

The big picture that emerges this week looks something like this:

The Tories are deepening their encroachment in traditional Labour areas. Big chunks of the north, outside the big cities, are being gobbled up by the Conservatives. But the latter suffered some serious setbacks in local council elections. The electorate in its wisdom gives with one hand and takes with the other, to keep  politicians on their toes.

Labour are tightening their grip on the big cities with their star metro-mayors Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan (surely both contenders for the crown in the event of a leadership challenge). But elsewhere they have fared badly in the local elections, so this feels like a retreat into safe territory.

The long tail of Brexit still plays to packed houses despite a long list of downsides: destabilising the delicate balance in Northern Ireland; provoking a fishing war; driving small businesses and sole traders nuts with red tape; triggering an exodus of valuable human and financial capital; and causing friction with neighbours, friends and allies.

But the elixir of sovereignty, of taking back control, still runs in the veins and remains a potent vote winner. Voters who plumped for the Brexit Party in 2019 in Hartlepool appear to have switched en masse to the Tories this time. This narrative will run for a while before the reality of daily life in regions battered by a decade of austerity resurfaces.

Then there is the curious paradox that is Boris Johnson and a Tory party mired in dubious practices and questionable ethics. The PPE procurement scandals, the school meals fiasco, the cosy relationship between ministers and Tory donors with deep pockets, cash for curtains and other dodgy dealings appear to count for little.

Johnson is a man who consistently fails to pass the test of basic competence and yet remains popular. He obfuscates, he waffles, he U-turns. But he has, for some, star quality. His inability to get across a brief is eye-popping and yet he keeps moving forward. He lacks the gravitas of a Prime Minister but aces elections.

The success of the vaccine roll-out will head off the worst of the inevitable third Covid wave. The pandemic remains the overriding preoccupation for most people. The vaccine boost has blunted their anger over a dysfunctional health strategy largely responsible for the highest death toll in Europe. 

Johnson’s success baffles our allies. To them he is the loser who keeps on winning. But he remains an alluring figure who conjures up a compelling if illusory image of Britain. You have to take that seriously.

On the other side of this dismal equation is the opposition. Keir Starmer’s first year has been devoted almost exclusively to persuading us that he is not Jeremy Corbyn, that he accepts Brexit and that he is a patriot.

But he has failed to tell us who he is, what he stands for and what kind of country he wants to lead. He’s a sharp operator in the Commons because it resembles a courtroom. But he fails to register on the doorstep as someone with a belief system, let alone one for which he would lay down his life.

Labour has lost the trust of working people and Starmer has failed to reverse that trend. There is talk of radical change. But what does that mean? The only radical I see is Boris Johnson, who has magicked a winning formula of flag-waving patriotism, state-led spending, deregulation and gunship diplomacy. It’s catchy, but it won’t address the profound social and economic problems that bedevil the country.

So here we are. The Labour Party’s internal battles will flare up again. For the time being the pandemic will dictate the tone and feel of politics: health, public services and the wider economy.

The Tories, not unreasonably, are cock-a-hoop. The party is tightening its grip on England. This matters because their presence in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where they won just 0.4 per cent of the vote in the 2016 Assembly elections, suggest that England, for all the optimism, could be the party’s last redoubt.

We’re not, as some have suggested, heading for a one-party state. But we are stuck in a rut, our true potential held back by a suffocating first-past-the-post system.

For those of us in what I call the rabid centre (with a slight leaning to the Left in my case) the big unfulfilled objectives remain: social justice; affordable housing; deep reform of the welfare state; a strong NHS; a humane immigration system; a government that is honest, transparent and accountable; investment in community hubs around which citizens can build their lives, based on their needs and their aspirations.

I don’t think Boris Johnson will deliver these. But I’m not sure Keir Starmer can either.

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