As political calls go, the Doyle one is not a difficult one. It’s perfectly fine in my view to believe a friend’s claims of innocence, but if they then go on to plead guilty, the obvious political reality is that you are never going to be a viable candidate for membership of the House of Lords. Frankly, if they do not plead guilty and continue to protest their innocence, unless or until they are acquitted, you are not going to be a viable candidate for membership of the House of Lords.
To grasp that you should not need to be, or employ, “a brilliant strategist, focused ruthlessly on what the voters think”, as many connected to this government keep telling me the departed Morgan McSweeney was. If you oversee a Downing Street operation that cannot get such an obvious call right, what other mistakes are you making?
Of course, it is an open secret that Starmer has delegated a great deal of responsibility as prime minister, but that doesn’t make him any less responsible for the mistakes. And that’s one reason these mistakes should worry us all, regardless of our political affiliation. If you fall headlong into a scandal about freebies that no organisation with a modern gifting policy would fall victim to, you are probably going to make big mistakes elsewhere. If you cannot navigate these simple political questions, what other mistakes are you making?
That, of course, is something Starmer’s would-be replacements know too, and while some of these mistakes can easily be blamed on Starmer, what worries some of his would-be replacements is that if they replace him too early, they will be left carrying the can for mistakes that none of us know about yet.
FT