Afterwards his top team of aides, jubilant his speech had landed so well, celebrated with a round of drinks in Liverpool’s Pullman Hotel, just yards away from where Starmer had been speaking.
Starmer has spent this week drawing a careful distinction between what he says is racist – graffiti telling migrants to go home and Reform’s policy to limit indefinite leave to remain for migrants who’ve been in the UK for years – and what isn’t, namely Farage or his supporters.
Enter David Lammy, the Deputy Prime Minister, to repeat allegations that the Reform leader marched through a village “shouting Hitler Youth songs” while a schoolboy, a claim strenuously denied by Farage for over a decade and based on an uncorroborated letter from one of his teachers in the early 1980s.
Lammy, like a badly concussed Torquay hotelier, simply cannot help mentioning the war. In January 2019, after Donald Trump posted his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan on social media, Lammy commented: “Hitler said the same about Germany in a speech in February 1940… We see you Mr Trump.”
Only hours after his key aides were drinking to the Prime Minister’s careful, polished, precise message, Lammy had undermined it. What’s more, the Justice Secretary played right into Farage’s hands.
“It’s quite clear that Cabinet ministers are falling over themselves to say they are playing the ball, not the man – but we can all see that’s not the case,” a Reform source told The i Paper on Wednesday.
square KITTY DONALDSON Keir Starmer has just bought himself some more time in No 10
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Reform is now talking up Antifa as a threat. It’s a loosely defined, far-left movement that Trump has designated a terrorist group in the US. Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, also claimed that Farage’s taxpayer-funded security detail has been slashed by three-quarters in recent weeks, with private donors now covering the costs, deliberately suggesting Starmer is putting Farage at greater risk.
Yet Lammy is not the only one guilty of overreach. Away from the precision of his conference speech, Starmer spent a series of broadcast interviews trying out new attack lines on Farage. In an interview with GB News aired on Wednesday morning, the premier suggested Farage was partly responsible for the Channel crossings because of his enthusiasm for Brexit, an argument Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has been using for weeks.
But it’s a claim that doesn’t add up. Yes, when the UK left the EU in 2020, it pulled out of the Dublin Convention – the agreement which allowed it to return asylum seekers to the EU countries from where they came. But the arrangement worked both ways. Between 2016 and 2020 the UK was a net recipient of asylum seekers. There is also no world in which that convention has stopped mass migration to the countries which remain in the EU; those boats keep on coming.
And there is a more fundamental problem for Starmer in this current racism row. Even if you strip away Lammy’s idiocy, and the nonsense about the Dublin Convention, will the public hear the distinction Starmer made in his planned speech, when he’d had time to think about precisely what he’d wanted to say?
And rather than change voters’ minds, won’t this row encourage them to give Starmer and his party a kicking at the ballot box even more? The Prime Minister clearly thinks it’s a risk he needs to take.
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