“But aren’t there means of dying without pain?”
“Imagine”—he stopped before me—“imagine a stone as big as a great house; it hangs and you are under it; if it falls on you, on your head, will it hurt you?”
“A stone as big as a house? Of course it would be fearful.”
“I speak not of the fear. Will it hurt?”
“A stone as big as a mountain, weighing millions of tons? Of course it wouldn’t hurt.”
– Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky
As Starmergeddon deluges Westminster at last, a number of calculations will open up for Labour, chiefly related to smothering opposition and poaching their issues in order to redirect them.
With such a mandate as he is likely to achieve, right wing opposition will (at least at the outset) appear pygmy-like and dispersed. Battling over the 40% of the electorate which votes for the Right will take place between factions with different visions of the country. The next generation of Wet Conservatives; people like Will Tanner (if he is given a safe seat) who have had a very active role in the last year of Government (look at the relationship between Onward and Number 10), battling it out with the right of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, with large outside challenges from Matthew Goodwin and Dominic Cummings.
Within Labour, given the nature of their majority, with an annihilated SNP and strategically bulldozed LibDems, redirection will pivot to containing Green extremism and an intelligently lead (by Galloway-Corbyn-McDonnell) Union-BAME Left coalition. The Left proper will have handily jettisoned the constitutional issues which sunk it in 2019, and have a variety of healthy inroads to pursue on war, economics, and the social settlement.
Labour’s leadership also has an interest in what happens on the Right of politics. We are not the only ones reflecting on what maquette to mould from the fresh clay of the Tories. If you look closely enough, the Kriminal has already laid his nefarious designs in the back pages of the Financial Times.
Gray and her very moral roster of reform has one notable lacunae. Ex-Ministers will still have reasonably free rein to engage in lobbying. They have chosen to water-down their pledge to stop Ministers moving in to the Private sector. This was originally a response to Greensill, a righteous panacea to ‘Tory Sleaze’.
Their strategic intention is clear: trigger a bum’s rush of the remaining frontbenchers into a private sector greedy for insider consultants, leaving an evacuated husk of doughy 2019 intakes with no backbench experience to lean on. The vast quantity of Tory Big Beasts who have already announced their resignations within a week of the election being called is, in part, a product of Keir Starmer leaving the door open for them to enter lucrative lobbying jobs after the 2024 election.
Lord Cameron, on the other hand, will remain behind, all conditions remaining pari passu. Since his reputation is torched over the Greensill collapse, there is no private sector pathway for him. The revolving door is jammed.
Starmer and Gray know this, and I suspect arranged for him to be tapped for a political return via intermediaries.
“Dave, you’ve a chance. To repair that reputation. To rebuild that trust. To reinvigorate those relationships.”
And even more fascinating is the wind is back in his sails for any venture. He has brought back his Prime Ministerial Comms chief, Sendorek, his Political Private Secretary from Downing St. is back too, as is the coeval Director of Operations and Campaigns. A Head of Political Press (Sendorek) is a very senior job as a SPAD, being a Media Spad for a Cabinet Minister (which he now is) is not. Why would Sendorek abandon a lucrative directorship to return to government for Cameron in a junior position? Clearly promises have been made.
There are many Conservative politicians who could reasonably present themselves as a continuity Cameron candidate; Tom Tugendhat is the closest in style, Penny Mordaunt may also try to wear some of the same clothes. But mainstream conservatives, and the Tory establishment as it exists, still get very misty eyed about 2010-16. That Cameron almost lost the 2010 election against all odds and was only able to win in 2015 after he promised to hold a referendum on Europe does not tar this romanticism. If Lord Cameron did decide to run he would sweep these people aside easily.
I believe that Lord Cameron is plotting a return to the leadership. Plenty of safe seats are being put up for grabs by the election exodus if he feels he must go back through Parliament, and Rishi’s team would be all too happy to put him forward.
He has already had to specifically ruled out working for Keir Starmer as Foreign Secretary. This was suggested by Gideon Osborne, and cheered on by Cameron’s client hacks (Andy Coulson was Downing Street Director of Communications for Cameron until he was forced out by the Phone Hacking scandal). It seems likely that Cameron himself planted the story, a miscalculation which ended in severe reprimand by the leadership; but one which Keir himself may have also entertained for a time.
Starmer never explicitly dismissed the overture, so it still hangs in the air. Lammy recently had to grease himself up for a Republican victory in November, because of his witless past remarks about Trump. Lammy has a credibility issue regarding international relations. He is also personally disliked within the Labour Party establishment for a variety of reasons, even a year ago the majority of insiders believed that Lammy would not be allowed to stay in as Foreign Secretary for the election.