Walk up the well-known yellow staircase in No10 and you’ll discover how few portraits of former Prime Ministers peering from the partitions are of the Labour occasion.
There are solely six, a mere half a dozen, because the first, Ramsay MacDonald, moved into Downing Street 100 years in the past at the moment. The Conservatives have had 5 since 2016 alone so Keir Starmer could be creating his personal little bit of historical past ought to he, as is extensively anticipated this yr, change into Labour’s seventh after MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan, Blair and Brown.
Though it has offered the PM for under 33 of the previous 100 years, Labour has achieved a lot that’s golden and enduring, headed by Clement Attlee’s valuable reward of the NHS. Yet it additionally helps clarify Labour’s gnawing nervousness regardless of opinion polls and the bookies displaying Starmer is red-hot favorite to be Britain’s subsequent Prime Minister.
Four defeats on the trot are grim reminders to take nothing, completely nothing, without any consideration. Ahead of Starmer there are dozens of Wilson’s “long weeks” throughout which fortunes can fall in addition to rise. Nobody in Britain would nonetheless be paying tax if we loved reductions each time a Tory Government that talked about slicing charges really did so.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Budget on March 6, nonetheless, will likely be in a kind of lengthy weeks, arguably the final one, because the response to Tory election bribes would possibly seal the deal for Labour or revive Conservative fortunes.
My impression is what’s left to play for is barely the size of Starmer’s victory, as voters present precisely how fed up they’re with the incompetent and sleazy Conservatives. Shadow Cabinet members whisper that Starmer repeatedly warns in opposition to corrosive complacency even because the occasion’s workforce meet civil servants to debate how they might implement Labour’s programme.
In the Scottish fishing port of Lossiemouth on the weekend, I listened to tributes to MacDonald, an illegitimate son of a farm labourer and introduced up in horrible poverty. MacDonald wasn’t actually prepared to manipulate in January 1924 and had no majority. He needed to govern with fewer seats than the Conservatives, later that yr shedding an election because of the notorious Zinoviev letter smear trick.
But he demonstrated Labour weren’t “wild men” incapable of working Britain, implementing a house-building initiative that saved 500,000 households from slums.
MacDonald was again in No10 in 1929. His nice betrayal of 1931, forming a coalition National Government with largely Conservative ministers, is for an additional day. Starmer setting his sights on at the least two phrases and 10 years if, or most likely when, he triumphs in 2024 is an more and more assured chief making up for his occasion’s misplaced time.