Andrew MacDougall: Poilievre will have to avoid the Starmer flop
Even in his early days, the new U.K. looks and feels a lot like late-stage Trudeau
By: Andrew MacDougall
If Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre thinks he’s halfway home to a happy life in power, he should look across the pond to see the misery now engulfing Sir Keir Starmer and his new Labour government.
Where to start? Sadly for Starmer, there is a smorgasbord of bad political choice.
Starmer spent the first months in office — critical for any new government — making every Briton miserable by saying taxes would have to go up to fill the fiscal “black hole” left to him by his Conservative predecessors. He then added another £9.4bn to the void with a bumper pay rise for public servants. He “negotiated” a lucrative pay deal for train drivers, only to see them pledge an autumn of walkouts on the key rail lines connecting north to south. He pledged to get a grip on migration, only to see record numbers make the journey across the English Channel. He pledged to end Tory sleaze, only to cop to taking over £100k in freebies in the last Parliament, an amount that included box seats at his beloved Arsenal Football Club (at the same time his government is proposing to overhaul football governance) and over £16,000 worth of clothes from Lord Alli, his top donor. Alli also kicked in clothes and other baubles for Starmer’s wife, his Deputy Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, and Education Minister. If Britain needs to mine some tin, it could do worse than drill Starmer’s head.
The end result? Starmer’s approval ratings have dipped, and drastically, with over half of Britons now reporting an “unfavourable” view of their new prime minister. This, let’s remind ourselves, is the same man who just won 411 of the 650 seats in the British Parliament only three months ago. Put differently, there are still four and two-thirds of a year still left in his mandate.
All of the blessed new government smells have been replaced by the stench of a rubbish tip. It’s both shocking and puzzling, given Starmer was recently Poilievre, in opposition but in complete control of the narrative. Starmer was the incoming breath of fresh air. He was hope. He was change. Now he’s Justin Trudeau, and late-stage Trudeau, to boot.
Then again, one could argue Starmer was never going to get a chance to play the role of early-stage Trudeau. The year of our Lord 2024 is vastly different to the universe Trudeau inherited when he came into office around in 2015. Put simply, 2024 sucks. There is no market for “sunny ways.” Or, at least, there is no way to credibly deliver sunnier outcomes, not quickly, anyway.
Russia is still in Ukraine, and on the march. Israel is escalating its battle with Hezbollah, sending the Grim Beeper into Southern Lebanon to kill and maim it enemies, including Hassan Nasrallah; now ground forces have gone in behind the airstrikes. And it’s launching those raids with Gaza still painfully unresolved. The global economy is still struggling to find consistent growth and interest rates are still too high. It’s a tough inheritance for any opposition leader.
And while Starmer did his level best to stay vague during the election campaign about his planned solutions, as all good opposition leaders do in order to minimize incoming attacks, he was meant to have a plan to sort it all out once he got into the building. But there’s no plan. And that’s according to sources inside 10 Downing Street. That’s right: we’re just three months into a majority parliament and a government with a virtually unopposable mandate and the calls are already coming from inside the building saying it’s all gone to shit.
As I was saying, it’s all very late-stage Trudeau.
Fortunately for Canadians who are desperate for a diversion from Trudeau’s path, Pierre Poilievre is a better politician than Keir Starmer. A vastly better politician. And while that might sound like a pejorative in an era where no politician is trusted, the pile of public policy muck heaps facing Western governments won’t be cleared without someone who understands — deeply and intuitively — the politics of the current time.
Starmer understands none of the current dynamic. He defeated the U.K. Conservatives because the U.K. Conservatives defeated themselves. The country would have taken anyone to stop the Tory psychodrama, even a boring North London lawyer who wouldn’t know politics if it smacked him on his newly-tailored arse. People are angry that nothing appears to be working as it should. Not the hospitals. Not the borders. Not the economy. And not their culture. Everything feels different and/or worse to what they’ve come to expect and they blame the (waves arms frantically) “establishment” for their ills. There’s a reason Nigel Farage’s Reform party won its first seats and came second in nearly a hundred more.
People who are already feeling stretched don’t want to hear, as they’ve heard from Starmer, that their taxes are going up. They want to hear they’re going to go down. “Axe the tax,” anyone? They don’t want to hear that things suck; they want to hear how things will get better. They don’t want to be sung hymns about the benefits of immigration. They want to see someone spot the problem that’s gotten out of control and assure them that it's not racist to do something about it. They want someone who looks and sounds like them, not another politician in a suit saying things politicians in suits always say. They want radical change, not minor dial adjusting on the dashboards of power. Anything else is more of the discredited same.
Canada’s late-stage Trudeau inheritance is daunting. It cannot be avoided. But it must first be acknowledged, not by simply pointing at the last guy and saying “It’s all his fault” (i.e. the classic politician move), but by mirroring the real distress being felt by the many who’ve lost out where and as the traditional power brokers have won. This is where the room to manoeuvre comes from. Something has gone wrong and it’s going to take something different to produce a different result.
You might not like Poilievre’s version of “different,” but try opposing it with your more of the same. See where that gets you. Of course, Poilievre will actually have to achieve that different once in office. Mirroring without delivery is a recipe for more distress, as the United States found out after Trump 1.0. Because a good politician not only feels your pain, he or she must alleviate it, too.
Andrew MacDougall is a director at Trafalgar Strategy and former head of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
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Great article. My question, or thoughts, regards our media. Assuming PP does make changes will our media immediately pounce and villify those changes simply because they can? Unfortunately media do drive opinions. Most of us don't dig deep, a remark I likely resemble.
I fear there’s no desire among the populace to take the pain that has to come, and zero chance any politician will campaign on what needs to be done.
The greatest example of that was Ralph Klein in 1992; Alberta voters knew exactly what he planned and he followed through.
Imagine the CPC telling us now that massive cuts to public service and government spending would be enacted immediately upon taking office. Ain’t happening, EVER.
But it needs to.