The Labour leader must know his party faces existential implications if it suffers a historic fifth election defeat
Britons usually eat more than 10m turkeys during the festive season. If the country were to run short of the yuletide bird then that may be the crisis to crystallise for voters Boris Johnson’s leading role in letting down the public. Mr Johnson has gone to extraordinary lengths to deny his complicity in failure. Yet his fingerprints are all over recent upheavals: the panic buying of petrol, the empty supermarket shelves, working people facing steep cuts in benefits. Leaving the EU has allowed the government to make mistakes and Mr Johnson has embraced this freedom with gusto. During Covid, British lorry drivers failed to get the message about a Brexit dividend of wage hikes and left their jobs. Ministers have been forced to ask European workers to make up the shortfall and save Christmas for the country that claimed it no longer needed them.
No one ought to believe an inveterate liar. The fact that many Labour voters who backed Mr Johnson still give him the benefit of the doubt lies at the heart of Sir Keir Starmer’s electoral problem. The prime minister dodged the blame for his catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic by spinning it as a story of vaccine success. In a crisis, there are two narratives in play at the same time. One is that a country is about to go off the rails. The other, Mr Johnson’s preferred oratorical territory, is that this is an opportunity to wake up a nation’s potential.