I miss Starmer already

Being innately averse to embarrassment, I usually avoid making political predictions. That’s a game one can’t win.

Get a prediction wrong, and even one’s best friends permit themselves mockery of the most scathing kind. Get something right, and one shares Cassandra’s fate of being ignored.

The only time I couldn’t contain my prophesying urges was in the early nineties, when just about every conservative pundit was high on glasnost and drunk on perestroika. Some of them were ignorant of basic facts; even those who weren’t didn’t understand the nature of the Soviet regime.

I was writing articles in small-circulation conservative journals saying that what was happening in Russia wasn’t a history-ending triumph of liberal democracy, but merely a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB.

The blueprint for that scheme was drawn by Lavrenty Beria, who believed, correctly, that the MGB (as it then was) was a more subtle weapon in the war against the West. He advocated a version of Lenin’s NEP: allowing more private enterprise, disbanding collective farms, increasing the production of consumer goods – even allowing the two Germanies to unify.

Then, under the guise of that liberalism, the MGB would slowly undermine Western institutions, recruit a whole army of the kind of people Lenin unkindly called ‘useful idiots’, seduce the West into disarming by pretending to be committed to eternal peace. And then Russia would pounce.

Shortly after Stalin’s death, Beria presented his ideas to the Politburo. Those Party apparatchiks took several minutes to catch their breath, after which they indulged in the communists’ favourite method of political debate by having Beria killed.

Yet his ideas didn’t die, being subsequently transferred like a relay baton from one KGB chief to the next until one of them, Andropov, became the Supreme Leader in 1982. A faithful disciple of Beria, he began to put his plan into practice. However, knowing he was dying, Andropov hand-picked a successor he trusted to complete the work.

Gorbachev, who owed his whole career to Andropov and was in cahoots with the KGB in general, took over three months after his mentor died and, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of Beria’s perfidy.

Most people considered my take on the situation eccentric, those less kind thought I was mad. Even though many of my critics told me later they had been wrong and I had been right, I put my crystal ball away – my brittle psyche couldn’t handle accusations of madness lightly.

That preamble is supposed to make you appreciate even more that I’m now going to break that habit and make three predictions about the local elections coming on 7 May. I doubt any of them will induce anyone to accuse me of emotional instability.

My three predictions, arranged in the descending order of certainty are: 1) Labour will suffer a bloodbath across the country, 2) Starmer will resign as a result, 3) We’ll end up missing him because his successor will be even worse, difficult though that possibility is to imagine.

My order of certainty descends, but not too steeply. The first prediction is based on the polls. Such surveys are often unreliable, but not when they point, as they do now, at a catastrophic defeat. So take it as read: Labour will be thrashed.

My second prophecy is almost as certain. Starmer is already hanging by a thread, and no party leader can survive the kind of trouncing Labour will suffer on Thursday.

And yes, I do believe that every realistic alternative to Starmer mooted so far will be even worse, even more destructive, even more anti-British. Those who will doubtless cheer Starmer’s demise and call him evil will be quickly reminded that, as ever, even greater evils exist.

Starmer and all his possible successors are Marxists, no doubt about that. Yet anyone who, like me, had to spend years studying the history of Marxism will know that this evil doctrine is like booze, whose strength varies from 3 per cent thin beer to 96 per cent pure ethanol (please don’t try to drink the latter without talking to me first: there is a technique involved that must be followed on pain of serious oesophageal damage).

Starmer is essentially a feeble-minded apparatchik weaned on Marxist fallacies but not fanatically devoted to them. In fact, he may not even realise he is a Marxist: the dogma has lodged itself in his viscera, bypassing what’s known as his brain.

His possible replacements are different. Andy Burnham, who may insinuate himself into a safe Labour seat and launch a leadership challenge, proudly calls himself a socialist. And specifically? What kind of socialist, Andy? Oh well, if you insist: “redistributive, collectivist and internationalist”. So how are you different from Marx and Lenin then? That tactless question was never asked, probably because the interviewer knew the answer.

Ed Miliband seems to angle for the keys to 11 Downing Street, not 10, probably believing he could do greater damage as chancellor, not PM. Ed is widely known as a net-zero fanatic prepared to save the planet by ruining the country.

But that’s not giving Ed full credit for his febrile Marxism. He also wants to make the 50 per cent top tax rate permanent, introduce a new financial transaction tax, limit top salaries by state fiat, implement a living wage policy and create a ‘National Care Service’. In other words, to turn Britain into a socialist state totally, as opposed to predominantly.

Both Andy and Ed criticised Tony Blair for not being Marxist enough, whereas in fact he only camouflaged his Marxism with Beria-like perfidy.

Wes Streeting wants to come in on the right rail, pretending not to be a Marxist at all. However, he has mentioned his desire to increase corporation tax, while throttling businesses with a whole raft of new employment rights.

Like all other candidates, those who are proud of being socialists, Streeting is a committed internationalist. In 2018, he declared that Brexit would answer people’s concerns about sovereignty and migration but would cause significant economic harm.

He was only half right: his government’s efforts, and his personal contribution, did cause economic damage that they then mendaciously ascribed to the fallout of Brexit. But migration has, if anything, got worse, while Streeting and his friends are busily sweeping away the few crumbs of sovereignty Brexit granted.

“We should be honest with our country,” Streeting once said, “that we also rely on attracting people from overseas… .” Quite. Such as 100,000 Somalis making a sizeable contribution to the crime rate and hardly anything else.

In his own health brief, Streeting explained we must replace hospital doctors with social workers. He put it in the Aesopian language of ‘three shifts’: “from an excessive focus on hospital care to more focus on neighbourhood and community services; from an analogue service to one that embraces the technological revolution; and from sickness to prevention.” As I said, replacing hospitals with community centres.

And on the issue especially close to his innermost feelings, Streeting stated that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. Such is the right end of the Labour Party, which brings us to the (retarded) people’s favourite: Angie Rayner.

Angie wears her working-class origin with pride, which suggests that her idea of a working class woman is a council estate slag who gets pregnant at 15 and leaves school, never to return. She then does no work other than climbing the greasy pole of union and Labour politics, becomes known for getting falling over drunk in public places (such as the Commons bar), and describing her parliamentary colleagues from across the aisle as “a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile… of banana republic… Etonian … piece of scum”.

Transgender rights, Black Lives Matter, Hamas – you name a subversive cause, Angie supports it. “I’m a socialist!” she screamed the other day at the Commons bar before staggering into a door with such force that it had to be taken off and repaired. Mine’s a Laphroaig, Ange, what are you having?

Please, Sir Keir, try to hang on for a while longer. You know how badly you’ll be missed.