Unlike Nigel Farage, Sir Keir Starmer has said remarkably little of note during this campaign. On several occasions he has stood next to a sign reading ‘CHANGE’ with his Starmer halftime expression – that of a man with unbearable piles gingerly lowering himself onto an inflatable haemorrhoid pillow. The most radical thing the Labor leader has done in the past month is wearing a white T-shirt that is too tight to look cool during the match against England. But Sir Keir Starmer KC is certainly not “one of the boys”. He looked like the branch manager of a second-rate construction company whose wife ran off with her Greek paddleboard instructor and is desperately trying to ‘get out again’.
Sir Keir is in a difficult position. In two weeks, he is about to become the least popular candidate ever elected prime minister but, bizarrely, also the one with the largest parliamentary majority in history. This is amazing, depressing, or amazingly depressing, depending on your taste.
Rishi Sunak remains deeply unpopular: only 20 percent had a favorable view of him last month (71 percent negative) – a net “favorability rating” of -51. That’s about as beneficial as the dog who stole the sausages from the Euros barbecue.
Starmer is more liked than his rival, although he is still deeply unpopular: 34 percent have a favorable view of the Labor leader and 51 percent think he is rubbish (a net favorable rating of -17). To put that into context, Sir Keir is about as popular as Ed ‘bacon sandwich’ Miliband was at the time of the 2015 election. (You will recall that Miliband led his party to its most stunning defeat since 1983.)
The coming landslide is therefore more a reflection of “disgust at the Tories than joy at what Labor has to offer”, according to polling firm Ipsos. Tuesday’s warning from the panicked conservative hierarchy, “Don’t risk a generation of socialism,” made me laugh bitterly. This column has been predicting since October 2022 that Tory voters feel so used and abused that they won’t care if their party goes up in flames. Even better, they have a whip for firelighters. (Wearing the noise-cancelling headphones of power for fourteen years meant the Conservative government was deaf to its supporters, too arrogant and complacent to listen and change course.)
So Starmer and Sunak are not catnip for the electorate; more fox poop. That crafty hound dog Farage likes to roll in it and cause a stink.
Under the circumstances, you can see why Starmer might be unwilling to draw up post-election plans that could lead to people hating him more than they already do. (If the garden tax rumors come to fruition, all I can say is that he’d better carry a cricket box to protect his lupines from ten million pruning shears.)
The one issue on which the Labor leader has spoken candidly, even passionately, is his refusal to use private healthcare. During a leaders’ debate on ITV, Starmer said that even if a family member were on the NHS waiting list for life-saving care, he would refuse to go privately. “No, I do not use private healthcare. I use the NHS,” he claimed piously.
For a moment the mask lifted and you could catch a glimpse of the hard-left ideologue beneath the dull, administrative facade. This is a man who says he would rather see relatives in pain in “our NHS” than devote his own significant resources to alleviating their suffering (and shortening the queue for someone who can’t afford to pay) , as long as the purity of his socialist principles remained untouched. What kind of person thinks like that?
Not something many Labor supporters identify with; 72 percent told YouGov they would use the private sector to avoid long waiting lists if they could afford it. The left’s old tactic of kneeling before the sacred cow of the NHS no longer works. That includes shaming those (like Farage and Reform) who refuse to bow to this huge, hopeless, bloated bureaucracy with a below-average healthcare system.
Too many families have raised money or taken out a loan to pay for a new hip for mom or dad. Too many people have paid £200 for a scan to speed up the disgusting, shameful and murderous wait for cancer treatment. Too many people have had grim personal experiences in the NHS, or seen parents or friends suffer avoidable deaths, to keep the faith as Starmer so stubbornly does.
Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting made a much more pragmatic comment The daily T podcast, in which he admitted he had considered going private when he recently discovered a lump. Streeting, who was treated for kidney cancer three years ago, said: ‘I was actually terrified. If the NHS can do it within a month, I’m willing to wait. If it’s going to take longer, I might just have to start paying for a scan for my own peace of mind, even though I knew – especially if you’re a Labor shadow health secretary – that there’s a real risk of this becoming a media storm. But I think, like many people, that health is more important.’
What did Streeting do other than criticize his leader? Ideology is not more important than health, as Starmer claims. Our future Secretary of State yesterday signaled his willingness to go further, saying a Labor government will buy thousands of private beds to ‘unblock’ a failing NHS and care system. There is “nothing left,” says Streeting, “that working-class patients should be left to languish in pain because of Lefty middle-class objections to the use of the private sector.”
Tree! Yet that inhumanity, the idiotic worship of the NHS by the metropolitan elite, is still a basic tenet of the socialist religion that prevents our country from adopting a well-functioning mixed-service system that other countries take for granted.
Starmer invariably brags about his working-class credentials, based on his father’s ever-so-gruesome job as a ‘tool maker’. The Labor leader has described the rather distant relationship he had with his father, who died in 2018; a “difficult and complicated” man who “kept to himself” and was “completely dedicated” to caring for Sir Keir’s chronically ill mother.
Delve a little further into the family history and you’ll see that Rodney Starmer actually ran the Oxted Tool Company, his own independent tool making business, until the 1990s. By all accounts, Starmer senior was a highly skilled, self-employed tradesman operating from a rented workshop on an industrial estate, and not the horny hands of the boss class that his son prefers to portray.
(Starmer is also cagey about his time at the selective Reigate Grammar School, which became private while he was still a student, although he was lucky enough to win a scholarship – exactly the kind of top-notch academic education his government plans to deny children with a similar upwardly mobile background by imposing VAT on school fees. What a hypocrite he is.)
A slippery Starmer has repeatedly ruled out raising taxes on ‘working people’. When asked yesterday what he meant by that term, he said: “people who rely on our services, and those who don’t really have the ability to write a check if they get into trouble.”
Starmer’s own father may not have met this definition, even as Keir tries to disguise his own privilege by milking the qualifications of his working-class ‘toolmaker’ father. Please explain that if you can.
A few days ago, Starmer suddenly claimed he was not hostile to paying for healthcare after all. “I completely understand why people would go private,” he said. But he doesn’t. Like so many in Labour, he is a prisoner of ideology that likes to feel morally superior to the rest of us, who should be punished with higher taxes for not being “working people” while picking up the bill by working.
That’s why Sir Keir is about to acquire the dubious honor of being our least liked, landslide-winning Prime Minister.
Personally, I find it inspiring that a man can rise from the workplace and grow his own business. But then I am conservative (expired, awaiting a new Messiah). Please don’t tell Sir Keir, but perhaps his father, the toolmaker, was also a Tory.
