The flaw in Starmer’s attack on reckless Farage

With a mere 1,533 days left until the last possible date for the next general election, Keir Starmer delivered his first speech of the campaign on Thursday. Ignoring the Conservatives almost completely (“they’re in decline, they’re sliding into the abyss,” he said), the prime minister used almost all of his remarks and the subsequent Q&A to attack Nigel Farage.

It was a session of soundbites and, more importantly, seed-planting. Starmer had a decent (for him) one-liner about Farage, currently in Las Vegas at a MAGA-adjacent cryptocurrency conference, gambling with your money.

There were repeated references to Farage’s huge blunder in saying Jaguar Land Rover deserved to go bust – it would have cost 11,000 British jobs – over a rebranding that he considered “woke”. There was deserved mention of Farage’s enthusiasm for Liz Truss’s kamikaze mini-budget, and warnings that Reform’s even more reckless plans would cause an even bigger cataclysm in a fragile economy.

The best section, though, was the seed-planting. Starmer asked: “Can you trust him? Can you trust him with your future? Could you trust him with your jobs? Could you trust him with your mortgage? Your pay slips, your bills?”

Labour need to see these seeds of doubt take root if they are to stop Reform’s poll surge. They are eight points behind the far right party in the latest YouGov poll, though No10 will be heartened that, when the same pollster asks voters who they’d prefer as prime minister, Stamer leads Farage by 15 points.

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This is the start of a very long campaign in which you will hear the same things again and again from Starmer (or maybe his replacement). That Farage’s plans would be a “mad experiment” involving “billions upon billions of completely unfunded spending. Precisely the sort of irresponsible splurge that sent your mortgage, your bills and the cost of living through the roof. It’s Liz Truss all over again.”

Conspicuous by its absence in Starmer’s attacks (and mentioned here previously) is Farage’s weakness as Mr Brexit. The normally talkative Reform boss fled the country on holiday last week when he could have been in the Commons debating Starmer’s Brexit reset, and gave it only fleeting attention during a press conference on Tuesday, called in haste after his absence was widely mocked. Farage said the deal was “a total sell-out and something that [Starmer] promised he wouldn’t do”, but apart from jabs at the 12-year fishing rights agreement and the role of the European Court of Justice, that was pretty much that.

Yet Starmer mentioned the EU deal only once. Is he waiting for tangible benefits of closer relations with Europe to be felt, or does he really think there is no benefit in tying Farage to a disaster even bigger and much harder to reverse than the Truss-pocalypse? The latter would be mystifying. “He told you Brexit would make you rich and it’s cost the economy £100bn a year instead,” is all Starmer has to say.

Perhaps he could take a leaf out of a book called A More Perfect Union, just announced by publishers Weidenfield & Nicholson. Its author, a leading human rights lawyer who will be familiar to Starmer, calls for “radical steps” from political leaders to admit that “Europe is once again central to Britain’s future” and argues that the UK should “build a union” with the bloc again.

The writer is Marina Wheeler, who spent 25 years married to Boris Johnson before she divorced him in 2018, reportedly receiving a settlement of £4m. The prime minister should follow her example in putting the worst firmly behind you and making sure the bad guys pay their dues.