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What was that? The Labour party on 11 per cent? In Caerphilly? When you look at the scale of the Government’s humiliation in this week’s by-election, you rub your eyes in disbelief. This is a seat that the Labour Party has held since the end of the First World War. It is one of those constituencies that gets no coverage on the night of a General Election – except a brief red line at the foot of your screen saying ‘Labour hold’ – and that is because until today it has been regarded as an absolutely impregnable stronghold of Welsh socialism. Now Caerphilly has crumbled like the eponymous cheese. The good people of the town have simply anti-voted Keir Starmer – and the question is, why? What has happened to his reputation – barely a year after he was elected with what was, on paper, a stonking majority? It is as though our beleaguered, bespectacled, bewildered PM is emitting some voter-repelling ultrasonic noise, like the ones used to deter foxes. Or possibly he exudes some sort of reverse pheromones that invisibly turn off the electorate. You remember the old ads for Brut, the supposedly irresistible aftershave? Well Starmer seems to have come up with a formula that has exactly the opposite effect, and he has been plainly splashing it all over. Let us leave aside the performance of the Conservative Opposition, which was not exactly stellar, and about which I have my theories. We are talking about the Government, which is now polling barely in double figures. It is the Government that is running the country – and plainly driving people nuts. We have got to the stage when football crowds regularly chant a simple ditty that goes ‘Keir Starmer’s a w*****’, to the 2003 tune of Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes. I am told that TV broadcasts have to find a way to muffle this brilliant and insightful slogan, because it infringes rules on political balance. In a way this is a kind of accolade, this Starmer song. It is quite something for any politician to have cut through like this, and to have diverted the politically apathetic football fans from time-honoured denigration of the opposing team. To have plumbed these depths of unpopularity, so fast, is an extraordinary and record-breaking achievement. I am sure that today in Labour HQ the various apparatchiks will be poring panic-stricken over the data, and wondering what they need to do to reboot the malfunctioning Starborg. Well, I think we can spare them the bother. It’s fairly simple. The British electorate has taken a long, hard look at the PM, and it has decided that he is a lawyerly, weaselly, shape-shifting Lefty hypocrite. It is an impression that has been growing with every day he has remained in office. He campaigned against the Tories by posing pharisaically as an upholder of ethical standards in government, and turned out almost immediately to be a whited sepulchre himself. When he looks at you with his moist, blinking, sorrowful eyes, and tells you how difficult it all is, he is STILL WEARING the luxury spectacles he got from Lord Alli, who was given, in exchange, a pass to No 10. He still hasn’t justified the ‘passes for glasses’ scandal. He is still wearing his sleaze-funded suits. He has still to explain exactly why No 10 got into direct negotiations with the mother of Taylor Swift about the police motorcycle escorts he gave her daughter, at public expense, before he and his family took freebie tickets to her concert. The whole thing gave an impression of greed and above all of slipperiness, and this was confirmed in the Budget of this time last year, when he blatantly went back on his electoral promises. Time and again in the 2024 election, Rishi Sunak said – entirely correctly – that Labour were going to cave in to their special interest groups, and put up taxes to pay for it. Oh no, said Starmer. We aren’t going to put up taxes on working people, he said. Well, that turned out to be at best a sophistry and at worst a goddamn lie. First they fire-hosed money at the unions, the train drivers, the doctors and others, with no gains in productivity. Then to pay for their profligacy, and above all to show the bond markets that Rachel Reeves was fiscally serious, they put up the National Insurance contributions of every business in the country. They made it substantially more expensive to employ people – and thereby discouraged hiring, deterred investment, and froze pay rises. If that isn’t a tax on working people, I don’t know what is. They simultaneously walloped the farmers, by changing the rules on inheritance tax, and attacked private education and non-doms, helping to trigger a stampede of talent from Britain. Thanks to Rachel Theeves and her disastrous debut Budget, the economy has been in the doldrums ever since. Interest rates and unemployment are now both higher than where they were in May 2024, and Labour’s doom loop means that one set of tax rises is set next month to trigger the next set of tax rises. That’s why Labour was on 11 per cent on Thursday – not so much because of the economic disaster, though that is bad enough. It’s the shiftiness, the refusal to be straight. Take the question of the winter fuel allowance, which has caused so much fury. As it happens, there is an argument to be had about whether ALL rich and comfortable people need an extra £300 bung from the Government, supposedly to pay for the cost of fuel. This is not some time-hallowed benefit that goes back to Good King Wenceslas. It was only brought in under Tony Blair. It does not need to be universal. If Starmer had wanted to means-test that benefit, and show his determination to reform welfare, all he had to do was say so. He could have stood up and said: ‘Look, the welfare bill is out of control. Tax is at, or near, an all-time high. A great many affluent households are getting this winter fuel cash, and this practice is very hard to defend.’ That would have been to show the public some respect. But he didn’t have the guts – either before the election, when pruning the winter fuel payment appeared nowhere in the Labour manifesto, and not in the run-up to the Budget last year. Instead Reeves just sprang it on the public, as if hoping that people wouldn’t notice, or wouldn’t mind. Well they did notice, and they minded so much that Starmer was forced into a U-turn that cost Reeves much-needed credibility on the markets. The whole thing just looked weak, and pitifully lacking in conviction. How many times has he mentioned that he was once the Director of Public Prosecutions, as if to imply that he is tough on crime, and loved banging people away? In office he has turned out to be so weak on crime that shoplifting seems to have been virtually decriminalised, and one of the reasons people are fleeing Sadiq Khan’s London is that there is an epidemic of street robbery. Has Starmer done anything to crack down? Has he hell. Far from banging people up, he has prematurely let out thousands of serious sexual and violent offenders from jail. In Starmer’s Britain, dangerous people are walking free – while a mother with no previous criminal conviction was slammed away, for almost a year, because of one stray tweet. He said he would ‘smash the gangs’ that are bringing illegal migrants across the Channel – but you only have to turn on your TV to see that he has done nothing of the kind. Flotillas of dinghies continue to depart from the Calais beaches, bursting with indigent humanity, and the Government seems absolutely powerless to stop it. Why? Because – as I never tire of pointing out – they scrapped the Rwanda scheme which, short of actually sinking the boats and drowning the passengers, is the only credible solution to the problem. It’s no use doing a one-in, one-out deal with the French because, as we saw this week, the gangs are simply thumbing their noses at us and sending the same people back again. Bring back Rwanda. Twin Kent with Kigali. Return the illegals on the volley – that is the way to fix it. Tragically, Starmer is now waking up to his mistake and seems to be trying to do a watered-down version of the Rwanda plan with Kosovo. It’s insane. We spent years and a lot of money on that Rwanda plan, and the best thing would be to revive it. But of course he won’t, because he just doesn’t have the guts. How many times have you seen him stand in front of a Union Flag, and say that he will defend the national interest abroad? But does he? No one I know can understand what the hell happened with the Chagos deal, where he managed to give away a key strategic asset of this country, and pay Mauritius – closely allied with China – more than £30billion for the privilege of stealing the islands from the UK. The Mauritian claim has no merit whatsoever. The Chagos islands are more than a thousand miles from Mauritius. The most charitable explanation is that he surrendered to his ghastly Lefty anti-colonial instincts, and thought that by yielding up Chagos he was somehow striking a blow against the legacy of empire. I now wonder whether it is worse than that, and whether the Chagos disaster was the result of Chinese pressure – because there appears to be a nexus of pro-China influence in Labour, involving National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell and Peter Mandelson, that has still not been properly investigated. As for Brexit, he moans about it so much that it sounds as if he would like to reverse the people’s decision. It sounds as if he would like to take us back into the EU, a body that has just this week admitted that, plus ca change, hundreds of Greek citizens have been taking huge sums of cash for goat herds and olive groves that do not exist. Does he really have the guts to put that proposition to the British people? When they know that going back into the EU would mean complete free movement of people, so that hundreds of millions were once again eligible to live in this country? When it would mean being run by Brussels again, and giving up our new-found legal and regulatory independence? When it would mean scrapping the pound and joining the euro? And when it would mean that hard-pressed taxpayers were once again sending more than ten billion pounds a year to Brussels to pay for a load of non-existent goats? If that is the fight Starmer wants to have, I say: bring it on, baby. But, of course, he won’t. He and Reeves would prefer to sit there and bleat. Far from making use of Brexit to cut regulation and unleash growth, they would rather use it as a pathetic and implausible excuse for their own manifest economic failings. The public can see all this. They can see the gutlessness, the shiftiness, the hypocrisy. That’s why Caerphilly has carefully taken aim and slotted him in the slats. That’s why the football crowds are already amusing themselves by chanting their verdict on Starmer.I suspect that verdict is final, and that it’s time for Labour to blow the whistle.
