UK politics and the local elections – how Labour’s unfaltering incompetence enabled this calamity

A directionless and incompetent government and a muddled and exhausted opposition have allowed a populist insurgency to triumph unchecked

The literary tastes of Sir Keir Starmer are something of a puzzle. One has to pick through his declared interests to get anywhere near the truth – discarding, for example, the atlas with shipping lanes that he chose on Desert Island Discs, presumably to give the impression of a practical man who always knows where he is going. Similarly questionable was his answer a year earlier when asked to name his favourite book: he picked A Disaffection by James Kelman, a Booker short-listed novel by a working class socialist Glaswegian written in stream-of-consciousness Scots. It is a good book but it did sound as if Starmer was trying just a bit too hard for someone who apparently is not a great reader and who reportedly doesn’t do so for pleasure.

More convincing was the revelation from a legal colleague in a 2008 Guardian profile that the man who is now our prime minister liked Kafka’s The Trial and knew it “backwards”. Putting aside the question if actually knowing it forwards would really be quite enough, this has a much more authentic ring, given that it relates the agony of a young man caught by mindless bureaucracy in an incomprehensible legal nightmare. Yes, that fits.

All of which is a way of saying what a shame it is that Starmer has (probably) not yet found time to read the outstanding political biography of our age, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Robert A. Caro, who is 89, has been engaged on this momentous work for almost half a century, has published four volumes so far in the 30 years up to 2012 when the last appeared and is still engaged on the fifth – while the literary world holds its collective breath for his continuing good health until, at least, the completion of this monumental project. It is, in its way, a history of American politics as well as a biography, but most of all it is a book about the acquisition and use of political power in a democracy. In my view Starmer cannot possibly have read the book because, if he had, the state of British democracy would not be where it now stands – where it trembles, indeed – in the wake of last week’s round of local elections.

Lyndon B. Johnson was some politician. He spent his entire life in pursuit of and then the dispensing of power. He was remorseless, indefatigable and pitiless. He left nothing to chance. And of course there is no meaningful comparison here with the life of Starmer and his role as British prime minister in the twenty-first century – given in particular that Johnson was utterly corrupt. But because I am halfway through reading the third Caro volume, it proved impossible to digest the results of the recent elections and not reflect that any professional politician with half an understanding of the sort of ruthless efficiency practised by LBJ would never have allowed such an electoral calamity to occur.

Yet Starmer knew what was going to happen. It wasn’t a question of just the writing on the wall, red or otherwise. It was plain from the opinion polls. The elections were certainly going to be disastrous for the Conservatives for other reasons, to which I will return. But Starmer’s Labour government, elected with a massive parliamentary majority and a mandate for change, has managed to arrange for itself possibly the worst first year in office of any administration in the history of the UK, certainly in living memory. And he and his team have not only done nothing to ameliorate the dog’s breakfast they have dished up, they have acted instead with unfaltering incompetence to make everything worse. As they continue to do.

I do not intend to rehash the errors here. They have been well advertised. You have read the analysis and we all now know what the voters think. If the Labour majority in one of the party’s safest seats can melt in the manner that happened in Runcorn and Helsby there is certainly now no such thing as a “safe” seat, given in any case the fact that in last year’s general election the Reform party candidate came second to the successful Labour MP in 89 seats.

But what matters now is what happens next and the portents are not promising. No wonder Nigel Farage is talking up his chances: his party’s take of seats and councils and mayoralties, its standing in the polls, this breakthrough even under the penalising First Past The Post system is indeed indicative of what Farage described as “the next level” of political penetration, of a proper populist insurgency. Reform’s programme may be unashamed in its appeal to the electorate’s self-interest. Its support may be shallow. It may be found out by having to run a whole host of councils. But who can be surprised that when it offers what people think they want this turns out to be popular?

In last year’s general election, the voters were looking for a change and that was what Labour had on offer. Literally. Vote for change, the party said. It won big because it was the viable alternative to the exhausted Tory rabble to which a succession of Conservative governments had reduced itself, but Labour had no credible narrative to stand up its promise of change. And the changes that it has brought to bear have proved not at all what was wanted by an already unsettled electorate.

It doesn’t feel to anybody as if life has noticeably improved in the past year; to many it seems the opposite. This new Labour government has thus alienated those who voted for it, who may not have been natural supporters but wanted ABC (Anything But Conservatives). However, it has simultaneously also managed to offend whole swathes of its own supporters by not being a brave, or radical, or even much of a socialist government. It has offended many – and not only Muslims – by its stance on Gaza. It has, I learned this week, upset many Roman Catholics by what was described as Starmer’s tone deaf response to the Pope’s death by taking two and a half hours to comment, while the prime minister is further criticised for failing to promote a single Catholic politician to the House of Lords.

We have become a country that has become accustomed to next-day delivery. We expect it. We want instant gratification and we want it now. In some of our major cities you can indeed get your deliveries to the door within the hour. Starmer seems to have recognised this impatience by responding to the seismic results in these elections by saying that he is determined to go “further and faster”. Yet take this response from a former Labour MP on a WhatsApp group with colleagues, “This just sends the wrong message to people who think we are going in the wrong direction.” The message adds: “My own brother (no fool) asked me last night if that meant more cuts.”

And if the Labour Party is unhappy, what then to make of the state of the Tories? “Parlous” scarcely covers it. Kemi Badenoch will be lucky if she lasts as leader. Yet Robert Jenrick seems unlikely to be the answer to any ­question so far posed and many are asking, rather, whether the party itself can continue to survive. Some even term this an “existential” crisis.

May I please here enter an argument on behalf of pedants everywhere and point out that, according to my dictionary, if you are wrestling with big questions involving the meaning of life you may be having an existential crisis. The Conservative Party is facing a crisis. It is also undoubtedly wrestling with big questions and one of them is its continued existence. This is not, properly, an existential matter.

The ground shook in Britain last week. “Seismic” is right. In the twenty-fourth minute of the Liverpool-Spurs match, when the third goal put Liverpool ahead and on course to claim the premier league title, the excitement caused the Earth to move at Anfield by the equivalent of 1.74 on the Richter scale. Something similar happened in the political realignment that occurred across the country last week. Yes, the two party system has ended. The failures of the two parties in question have seen to that. The Liberal Democrats and the Greens meanwhile are reaping some benefit from this indisputable reality and in due course the Nationalist parties will have their parts to play. What will be most interesting is how popular the populism of Reform will prove. It looks bumpy up ahead.

Julia Langdon is The Tablet’s lobby correspondent.