Tuesday 31 May 2022

Mandelson's 'Starmer' strategy looks like a winner

The bulk of the Left of the Labour Party, having thoroughly swallowed the mendacious soft-focus "I'm really a Corbynite" leadership pitch of Kier Starmer, rapidly became disillusioned (and in some cases, defenestrated) when he started purging the Peoples Party in a singularly calculating manner. 

And we know whose are the calculations: it's Mandelson, the preeminent British political strategist of the age. 

I feel we may now summarise his 2019 thinking, and estimate his chances of success.

1.  Corbyn has done a Thatcher**, potentially sterilising the Labour vote for years to come
2. The only chance of reversing that lies in someone who looks the part (besuited, established), grabs all the levers of power within the party  AND ...
3. ... methodically, gratuitously, ruthlessly and flamboyantly takes every opportunity to do Corbyn and his acolytes down (in ways that Hague, IDS and Howard could never do to Thatcher).  You don't want an excrescence of people who remind the electorate of Corbyn and, crucially, you don't need them; neither for their pitiful subscriptions NOR as election-time infantry  -  because elections are lost by sitting governments, and won by clever media strategies funded by big donations, not knocking on doors
And now we come to the reason why this all might come to fruition in less than a single political generation.
4. Johnson is always going to self-destruct: possibly sooner rather than later: the key is to be in position for when it happens
With any luck (thinks Peter) it'll be Johnson who, in turn, sterilises the Tory Party as did Thatcher, for another decade of Mandelsonian influence.

Looks like it's going to work.  Still: at least Mandelson is intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, eh?

ND
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** there's many a Thatcherite that has been in 30-year denial on this.  They have forgotten, or may never have tried, getting support for the Party during the leaderships of the aforesaid Hague, IDS and Howard.  Some things are never forgotten or forgiven by the electorate: Corbyn committed that kind of sin, and so IMHO has Johnson.  

20 comments:

Matt said...

This strategy relies on the bulk of the electorate being stupid, ignorant or both.

Oh, yeah, I see why it'll work.

dearieme said...

The only real black mark against Thatch seemed to me to be the Poll Tax. But what a blackie. What was she thinking of?

Don Cox said...

The Poll Tax is of a piece with her remark about there being no "society", only individuals. She believed in freedom and responsibility.

But it hadn't occurred to her that people who were not paying tax would object violently to being made to pay. VAT seems to have solved the problem, as it extracts tax from everyone.

I think her greatest accomplishment was the increase in the proportion of people who owned houses. It's a great pity that we are slipping backward on this.

Don

jim said...

No one is going to buy an overtly 'Socialist' manifesto - the Establishment, the DM/DT and the finance sector would scream and scream until they made themselves and us sick. For this reason Corbyn and Abbott have been sent to the back of the stockroom as unsaleable goods.

Tony Blair had to 'lie' to the unions and they had to 'believe' him if they were to stand any chance of power. The numpties who wanted socialism had to be silenced. What Blair delivered was Tory-lite and it worked fairly well. Starmer will have to follow suit. Blair's big mistake was being talked into playing with the big boys. Either a psychological weakness or some kind of pressure.

But underlying both Labour and Tory are fundamental forces that will continue to make the UK very difficult to run. Most of the problems come back to too much old baggage and too high land prices. Good luck with cutting Parliament to about 50%, slashing the NT, making most of the Royals get a proper job and flog off most royal and ducal lands. Might need a bit of arm twisting that one. Enjoy the Jubilee.

dearieme said...

Her remark was "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business …"

So rather than the fatuous abstraction "society" she attributed first importance to individuals, second to families, and third to neighbours. Seems fair enough to me.

Don Cox said...

Seems fair enough to me, but the idea is abhorrent to Marxists and other believers in big government. The thought that individuals might make their own decisions without permission horrifies them.

Don

E-K said...

Which of Johnson's sins ? (There are so many)

It will be the lockdown partying and even then The People will have the wrong end of the stick. The problem wasn't the partying, it was the lockdown - it turns out that even those enforcing them didn't believe in them... and for this Sunak has delivered the UK more debt than Darling, Osborne, Hammond combined.

That is lethal debt, which will kill people at a rate that they aren't bothering to recognise let alone count on TV every night.

I blame Boris for everything. Brino, the debt, woke, the blob - immigration now standing at over a million a year...

The worst PM in our history. Even the vaccine roll out would have been squandered had others in the Tory party not forced him to drop lockdown.

And then posturing over the war in Ukraine for his own self aggrandisement.

And like war in Ukraine we are an audience watching a political kick-a-about Red team vs Blue team.

Yay ! Blue team scores.

Who gives a shit ? Every which way socialism wins.

Anonymous said...


Blimey karate kev
You need a chill pill
Bet that vein is throbbing in yer temple.
Put the keyboard down

Don Cox said...

"I blame Boris for everything. "

I blame the Kaiser.

Don

dearieme said...

"Even the vaccine roll out would have been squandered ...": how long will it be before a majority of the population grasps that the vaccines will end up having done more harm than good?

Boris had better pray that they haven't by the next election.

Boris, however, can't compare in the bad PM stakes with Blair.

Anonymous said...

OT, a "dark" Hawker 800XP just landed in Chisinau, Moldova, from Tel Aviv. Probably just some oligarch, although they are used for SIGINT by South Korea.

But when I see a fast business jet anywhere near the Ukrainian borders my nose twitches suspiciously. As the kit has shrunk and with aperture synthesis you no longer need a big rotating thing on the top, so the business jet has become the platform of choice.


"some things are never forgotten or forgiven by the electorate: Corbyn committed that kind of sin"

What exactly was this sin which we can neither forget nor forgive? I must have missed it, other than giving the impression he'd reverse Brexit.

Anonymous said...

Mind, there's such a thing as being too successful. Would you fancy being PM at the moment? There's a world of pain ahead, which won't change when BoJo goes, as the last thing anyone is going to do is to announce that Ukraine/Sweden/Finland in NATO is a bloody stupid idea, that the UK will blackball any attempt to join, and that we'd like some gas and oil, please.

2500 litres of heating oil was £500 not long ago, it's £2500+ now. If we get a bad winter.. well we'd better not. I can see a hot 1981-style summer is not inconceivable.

Nick Drew said...

@ "Corbyn committed that kind of sin" ... What exactly was this sin which we can neither forget nor forgive?

Salisbury. Confirmed with ironclad certainty what most voters had already started to think: he's not Magic Grandad after all - he's beyond the pale

Anonymous said...

Ukrainian Antonov An-12BK transport, UR-11316, owned by a civil airline, leaves Uzhgorod, just inside Ukraine near the Polish border, but separated from Lvov by the Carpathians and with only single track rail links. I've been wondering why that airport's not used more, you can stay outside Ukrainian airspace til you're practically on the runway. It apparently arrived this morning starting from Istanbul with overnight stops at Suceava (Romania) and Budapest.

First flight I've seen from inside Ukraine, I imagine most of the air traffic there doesn't broadcast its position to the world.

Don't know what the form is when a civil airline continues flights during a war. But then I don't know why all the western airports haven't got pitted runways or why NATO/US/even Japanese weaponry is still coming in from Rzeszow.

Anonymous said...

That is lethal debt, which will kill people at a rate that they aren't bothering to recognise let alone count on TV every night.

As a debt advisor who sees people struggle every day with debt, I can only agree. And the growth in those seeking help has been the self-employed. Unlike corporates, they can't just raise new capital at the press of a button.

Then there are the silent ones. Those who have a very expensive home and no cash. Typically leasehold with leasehold bills rocketing due to Grenfell or refurbishment that had been put off for 2 years. Too proud to ask and if they did, there is no help available as they have assets.

If you hear anyone say "my home is my pension" tell them they need a reality check or the Samaritans number.

Elby the Beserk said...

dearieme said...
Her remark was "Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business …"

So rather than the fatuous abstraction "society" she attributed first importance to individuals, second to families, and third to neighbours. Seems fair enough to me.

3:48 pm
===========================================

Quite so, dearieme. Worth remembering that of all the people who come up with this quote have never actually read the speech in which it occurs which focuses on that long destroyed concept of "personal responsibility", radiating out in circles from the bedrock of family.

https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689

"What is wrong with the deterioration? [mistranscription?] I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and [end p29] there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”."

andrew said...

""I blame Boris for everything. "
I blame the Kaiser."

I blame the romans. What did they do fo us?

andrew said...

On what did corbyn do..
He has a long history of choosing to believe and have friends who anti semitic, or in the less peaceful irish republican end, or russian. After 30 years of that a lot of people think he may be standing for election in the wrong country.

On johnson. He has not managed to cause as much death as blair did so far - give the man time - but most of the deaths he can be associated are excess covid ones.
In the British consciousness he will be damned for partying the night before phillips funeral, where the queen sat alone to be compliant with the covid regs.

Anonymous said...

ND - I'd forgotten about Salisbury. My initial reaction was "Russia pardoned them, why should they then kill them?" but it seems their pardon was part of a prisoner swap of agents held by the US. So there was a definite grudge as they'd not been inside long.

Can't really blame them tbf. I presume the idea was pour encourager les autres. But the execution in every sense was pretty poor. Maybe the GRU aren't all they were in KGB days, when half the US government seemed to be agents.

Mind, we didn't go after Philby, and Tony Blunt died in his bed. Did anyone ever come to a decision on Roger Hollis?

E-K said...

Anon @ 5.32

Took your advice. Put the keyboard down ... put my trainers on, found a steep hill and did twenty minutes of sprinting up it.

I have excellent blood pressure and resting pulse going by my yearly medicals.