Sir Keir Starmer deliberately got personal in his annual Labour Party conference speech, describing Nigel Farage as someone who doesn’t like or believe in modern Britain, as a cynic stoking fear in the public with his alarmist rhetoric on immigration.
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.
One explained to The i Paper that the Prime Minister had taken a more direct hand in the drafting process, deciding to “call out” the Reform UK leader after a summer where he’d been allowed almost free rein to dominate the political argument.
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.
Unfortunately, the lawyerly precision in Starmer’s argument didn’t extend to the rest of his Cabinet. Directed to attack Reform at every available opportunity in Liverpool, it was left up to individuals to interpret how far they should range.
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.
“I’m not going to play the man. I’m playing the ball, as our leader did,” Lammy told Newsnight on Tuesday. “I will leave it for the public to come to their own judgEments about someone who once flirted with the Hitler Youth when he was younger.” Hours later he corrected the record.
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.”
In the same year he compared the European Research Group of Tory Brexiteer MPs to the Nazis and to defenders of South African apartheid.
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.
Lammy’s intemperate approach allowed Reform to go on the defensive and claim Farage is the one at risk of attack. The very accusation that Starmer made of Reform, that “they want to turn this country… into a competition of victims”, came true because Lammy let them do so.
“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 has used the recent death of US conservative activist Charlie Kirk to suggest rather hysterically that Farage and Reform activists could be in similar danger in the UK. Farage’s key ally Zia Yusuf spent Wednesday morning insisting: “If anything was to happen to Nigel, we will hold Keir Starmer responsible.”
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.
It’s an allegation that can’t be checked because the Parliamentary authorities won’t comment on individual MPs’ security arrangements but, even so, Starmer has no say in the matter.
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.
“Before we left the EU we had a returns agreement with every country in the EU. And he told the country it will make no difference if we left. Well, he was wrong about that. These are Farage boats in many senses, that are coming across the Channel,” Starmer said.
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.
In an interview with Sky News, Starmer was also asked about Trump’s absurd proposition Muslim Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is leading the capital into sharia law. The Prime Minister, shifting in his seat, called the claims “rubbish”, but could not bring himself to call out remarks by a key ally as racist.
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?
Or will would-be Reform voters gearing up to vote just hear a simpler statement instead: that Starmer thinks they are being racist by backing Farage’s migrant policies?
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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