Level Pegging

I could not disagree more with Piers Corbyn about Covid-19. But they only ever arrest him. They are still that spooked by the General Election of 2017.

At that Election, Jeremy Corbyn would have become Prime Minister if it had not been for the machinations of Labour Party staffers who were acting certainly in the interests, and no doubt with the connivance, of Keir Starmer. One trusts that Starmer will enjoy being a former Director of Public Prosecutions when he is in prison for fraud. #LockHimUp

Even if you truly believe that a 10-point lead has disappeared during the famously eventful last week in August, then so what? The Conservatives have an overall majority of 80, so level pegging with Labour would still translate into a Conservative victory.

On a day when it is reported that the Government intends to implement yet more of last year's Labour manifesto, this story has of course been confected in order to justify a challenge to Boris Johnson's Leadership in the name of fiscal and military hawkishness, a position that is internally incoherent, but there we are. Expect the pressure for this challenge to intensify if the fiscally and militarily hawkish Joe Biden were to beat Donald Trump.

How else, Conservative MPs would ask, could Starmer be defeated, except by capturing and holding his neoliberal and neoconservative ground? But in that case, then why not just support Starmer for Prime Minister? Conservative MPs who joined the Labour Party have never been expected to recant any past opinion or action. Alan Howarth was made a Minister by Tony Blair while continuing to defend both the pit closures programme and the Poll Tax.

And this once, "My party has left me" might do. Electoral dependence on the Red Wall, and not Covid-19, is why the Conservative Party has adopted its present position under Johnson and under Rishi Sunak. Starmer despises the Red Wall, he is delighted to see the back of it, and, with his second referendum, he was in fact more responsible than any other individual for Labour's loss of it.

Like most Labour MPs, many and perhaps most Conservative MPs hold to a position according to which there must be no deviation from an economic and social liberalism that the use of soft power where possible but hard power where necessary had made unquestionable at home, so that the use of soft power where possible but very hard power where necessary could spread it across the whole wide earth by means of an unquestionable alliance between the European Union and the United States, an alliance with Britain at both its cultural and its military heart.

The defeat of Jeremy Corbyn had been assumed to have made that position unassailable. Once again, there was simply to be no debate about either economic policy or foreign policy. But for that purpose, Corbyn lost the wrong seats. Meaning that Johnson won the wrong seats. Right now, he is fighting to free Britain from the State Aid rules of Margaret Thatcher's European Single Market, effectively announcing his view that Tony Benn had been right along. But if you do not believe that Tony Benn had been right all along, then you can still vote for the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. By voting for Keir Starmer.