Martin Kettle's Blog, page 8

The new Tory leader will be Badenoch or Jenrick. Either would be a one-way ticket to another political planet | Martin Kettle

By rejecting James Cleverly, MPs spurned the chance to renew their party. Their chosen path is further right, a blow for all who want an effective opposition

So the final Tory run-off, whose result will be announced on 2 November, will be between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. The one who thinks there’s too much maternity pay and that 10% of civil servants should be in prison, versus the one who alleges that UK special forces are killing suspects rather than arresting them and who promises to withdraw from the European human rights system as a priority.

There are no two ways about reading the result of the fourth and final round of voting by the 121 surviving Conservative MPs at Westminster today. It marks a triumph for the Tory right and another existential crisis moment for a party that was battered into a record election defeat in July. With this vote, Tory MPs have bought their party a one-way ticket to another political planet.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Unleashed by Boris Johnson review – memoirs of a clown

All the fancy verbiage in the world cannot disguise the emptiness at the heart of this self-serving, solipsistic book

Written once their authors have lost power, most prime ministerial memoirs try at some level to be reflective. David Cameron’s begins by confessing that he still has daily anxieties about having called the Brexit referendum. John Major’s starts even more disarmingly, by wondering why he went into politics at all.

But Boris Johnson does not do reflective. He never has and he never will. And nor does his new memoir, with its unnerving title, Unleashed. It covers his time as London mayor, Brexit campaigner, foreign secretary and prime minister. But if it is heart-searching and confessions you seek from the pen of Britain’s most iconoclastic prime minister, you can stop now.

It wasn’t just the physical distress; it was the guilt, the political embarrassment of it all. I needed to be bee-oing-oing back on my feet like an india rubber ball. I needed to be out there, leading the country from the front, sorting the PPE, fixing the care homes, driving the quest for a cure.

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Whether it’s Trump or Harris in office, Starmer will need an incredible US ambassador. Here’s my vote | Martin Kettle

Escapist and trivialising solutions are the Johnson and Truss legacy – but that won’t do now. The stakes are too high, the world too volatile

The widening of the Middle East war has a multiplicity of woeful causes and grim consequences. Many have the potential to become even more intractable in the weeks to come. Fresh human suffering in Israel, Lebanon and beyond is only the start of it. Donald Trump is wrong to claim we are on the brink of a third world war. But these events have global implications. Remember what happened after 9/11.

The latest bombings and missile attacks mark a historic failure for politics and diplomacy. This is not the first such failure in the Middle East. But wishing that diplomacy could prevail will not make it happen, and even fragile ceasefires are a long way off right now. As angry populations rally behind the respective combatants the prospects for desperately needed political solutions are almost negligible. You can’t stop a war if those on all sides are determined to fight.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please .

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After Labour’s near-death experience, Starmer needs a way to head off claims of sleaze. I have a way | Martin Kettle

We were promised an honest government of service and the public will demand that. If donors are to play a part, this is how

No iron law of politics says a government cannot recover from a bad early stumble. So don’t write Keir Starmer off too quickly because of the long game he insists on playing or the freebies he took. But don’t kid yourself that his government is not wounded either. Because, after only three months in power, it has already felt a brush with mortality.

The Labour conference in Liverpool has made little difference to this. Party conferences can seem absorbing when you are present. But their wider importance is overstated. The same goes for leaders’ speeches. Most people living outside the bubble barely notice them, and they didn’t care that much in the first place anyway.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Working together, Labour and the Lib Dems could exile the Tories for a generation | Martin Kettle

Starmer and Davey need to seize the moment. They have enough common ground to ally against their common enemy

Can the Liberal Democrats and Labour see themselves as allies in a common national project? Or are they fated to behave as rivals, always pursuing different goals? The question has been asked repeatedly, in various guises and circumstances, for more than 100 years, frequently in this newspaper. But there has never been a conclusive answer.

Today, as memories of the 2010-2015 Lib Dem-Conservative coalition fade, and following the two parties’ spectacular successes in July’s general election, a new version of the old question is on the agenda. Might the two parties now do to the Conservatives what the Tories and Labour did to the Liberals in the 1920s, and push them to the margins of politics?

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Both the Tories and the SNP suffered catastrophic defeats – but only one of them is facing up to that | Martin Kettle

John Swinney is talking frankly about where his party went wrong. The Conservatives kid themselves that a new leader is all they need

After a succession of victories, the governing party got a drubbing in the general election. This autumn, it must set out on the long, difficult road back. Some party members think something fundamental needs to change for success to return. Others seem adamant it was not the party that made the mistake, but the voters.

For many, the answer is not a change of direction. These supporters simply want a new leader, who they hope can do a better job of putting across what are, to them, the unchallengeable and thrilling truths for which the party stands, so that the scales fall from the eyes of the misguided voters. When Labour goes off the rails – and, look, they will say, there are signs of that happening already – there will then be a revival and everything will be hunky dory again.

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A warning from the No 10 garden and an EU olive branch. We are finally seeing Starmerism in action | Martin Kettle

In terms of problems at home and abroad, the PM’s aims are ambitious, social democratic and long-term. But he will need continual public assent

On Tuesday, in the Downing Street garden, Keir Starmer delivered a grim, generation-defining warning that “things will get worse” for Britain. On Wednesday, in Berlin, he gave a more upbeat resetting of European relations, with more to come in Paris, describing it as a “once in a generation opportunity”. The abrupt juxtaposition is striking. It embodies why so many still find it so hard to get a convincing handle on the prime minister and to have confidence in what he is really about.

Many responses to Starmer’s speeches often seem predetermined, in some cases lazily so, while others contain a nagging descant of truth. That has happened this week too. Starmer’s Labour critics said he was not bold enough – but then, that’s what they always say. The Conservatives – who spent the past decade raising performative politics into almost an art form – also dismissed the speech as performative. The Daily Mail denounced an attack on middle England, as usual. The Tory right alleged Starmer was undermining Brexit, whatever that now means.

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Labour’s radical employment rights strategy is risky – but it could rewrite British Labour relations | Martin Kettle

Labour’s radical employment rights strategy is risky – but, if successful, it could fundamentally change Britain and its economy

“I believe in management’s right to manage – and I also believe in the trade unions’ right to stop them.” This combative adage has always been attributed in my experience to Hugh Scanlon, who went from being one of the last of the overmighty trade union barons in the turbulent Britain of the 1970s to spending his later years as an actual baron of the realm before his death in 2004.

The words certainly represent Scanlon’s generally irreconcilable view of industrial relations under capitalism, as I can confirm from an expensive lunch I once had with this deeply interesting man in the 1980s. Many on the Marxist left of Scanlon’s era would have agreed with his words, the miners’ leader Arthur Scargill among them. And there are some union activists who still subscribe to them today.

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In cancelling his family summer holiday, Keir Starmer has made his first serious mistake | Martin Kettle

The days when Harold Macmillan could disappear to the grouse moors for the summer are gone – but even prime ministers need a break

It’s a mandate to do politics differently, Keir Starmer announced after the general election. After the chaos of the Conservative years, those were truly welcome words. Some said it made them feel as though the grownups were back in charge. But now, six weeks on, that turns out not to be so true.

Everybody needs a holiday. A proper holiday. A break from routine. A chance to relax, and focus on other people and other things. Prime ministers unquestionably need such moments, too – perhaps more than most. Yet by first postponing and now, it appears, by cancelling his family summer holiday in Europe, Starmer has made holidays a reputational issue. Starmer the human being has lost out to Starmer the politician. It is his first serious mistake.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Prom 31: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim review – an unforgettable and heroic return

Royal Albert Hall, London
Two years after he stepped back from performance, the conductor was back at the Proms – far frailer, but still able to conjure an instant response with a tiny flick of the baton

It was the concert many suspected we would never hear. Yet, on Sunday, nearly two years after he stepped back from performance following the diagnosis of his “serious neurological condition”, Daniel Barenboim was back. Back in the London to which he has given so much, back at the Proms which loves him, and – every bit as powerful in its defiance of calamity – back with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of musicians from Israel, Palestine and other Arab and Muslim countries.

In such circumstances, Barenboim’s determination to return felt heroic. The Royal Albert Hall was packed to acclaim him. But the strength of will, always a feature, comes at a visible cost now. Barenboim is far frailer, moves slowly on and off the platform, ascends the podium carefully, sits to conduct, and directs with only minimal gestures.

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