 Is Keir Starmer a wet wipe? According to Maya Lovion McLean, politics editor at Gal Dem, the answer is yes. This article went viral this week, and as we'll show later, appears to have got under Keir Starmer's skin. The article starts by referencing Starmer's failure to challenge a white supremacist on LBC on Monday. We talked about that on Monday's show. So of that incident, Lovion McLean writes, While watching Starmer resolutely feign momentary loss of hearing rather than tell a white supremacist where to get off was utterly demoralizing. It was also completely in keeping with the precedent for dodging taking an actual stance he set in 2020. Keir Starmer, you see, is a chicken. Eight months into his leadership, and it's become clearer that Keir doesn't particularly stand for anything. Instead, his tenure as Labour leader has so far been marked by profound cowardice and fence-sitting. He's combined both an unwillingness to offer anything in the way of new ideas, new policies, and steps forward with a simultaneous failure in defending existing left-wing battlegrounds and minority groups. And finally, we get to the killer blow. Try and name a single Keir Starmer policy. Go on, think of it. Anything? Nope. Now name a Keir Starmer abstention, of which there are more than a few. And I've said this got under the skin or seems to have got under the skin of Keir Starmer, or at least his office. This is from Politico's playbook email in response to this article. So a leader of the opposition's office source sends playbook this long defense of Starmer's record in response to the article. Since becoming leader, Keir has shown that the Labour Party is under new leadership. He secured a U-turn on the NHS surcharge, has taken a zero-tolerance stance on antisemitism, exposed the government's incompetence, helped force a U-turn on exams, committed the next Labour government to a new race equality act to tackle structural racism, forced two votes to extend free school meals, led calls for a national circuit break, closed the gap on the Conservatives and begun to climb the mountain to win the next general election. Now obviously the best line of that response is since becoming leader, Keir has shown that the Labour Party is under new leadership. I saw a tweet which I really liked. It's saying it's a bit like saying since I became a circle I've proved I am round. It doesn't tell you very much at all. This article seems to have concerned Keir Starmer because Gal Dem is a magazine which is read by young people, written by young people and especially seeks to represent young people of colour. Women and non-binary people is sort of the statement of intent. And these are, as we'll show in the data, coming up some of the reasons or some of the groups that Keir Starmer seems to be struggling with because we expect he seems to be putting all attention. He possibly can into winning back the red wall and is basically taking everyone else for granted. Keir Starmer has been in kind of a very false sense of security because the mainstream press has been really, really soft on him. They fairly sort of mentioned him really. He's barely sort of been in the picture. And that's only by virtue that he's sort of not Jeremy Corbyn and shows that he is sort of doing everything he can and saving his most sort of vicious attacks for the left and fought for Jeremy Corbyn rather than the Conservatives. And, you know, his leadership, obviously for many of the reasons that Moyer points out appears very, very weak. But I think it makes sense, you know, and I often say this, it makes sense once you sort of think about and contextualize that what is the actual purpose of his leadership? You know, it's to change the party. It's to reduce the power of members. It's to consolidate the power and increase the power of the PLP to sort of reduce the accountability to members and trade unions by increasing private financing. It's also to kind of disempower and demobilize like young socialists who were brought in over the past five years and to essentially destroy the power of the members and particularly left-wing members and, you know, the spirit of the left in the party for generations to come. I don't think he's really looking to the next election because, you know, it's still sort of many years away. He's more looking at kind of cleaning house. That's the purpose of his leadership. So they're kind of keeping their head down. He's keeping his head down really when it comes to public politics, which is why I think we're seeing a lot of these abstentions. But what it does is it means that we're going back to the days of people feeling disengaged from politics because they don't see any difference between the parties. You know, that was always a thing you would hear on the doorstep before 2015. And that, you know, this kind of brings us back up to the beginning of the show, which is that it will increase the proportion of people who are instead voting on kind of culture war terrains that are set up by the conservatives because this becomes the only real terrain on which the parties distinguish themselves from one another. And the reason that that terrain is so useful for the Tories is because they're setting it up on their terms, they're able to look like they're fighting for something. They're fighting for a particular constituency of people that still are influential in voting blocks and will be in the next election. And Labour, meanwhile, just look really mealy mouthed and just like they're trying to kind of play all sides and like these very, very overly focused groups messaging. And it's kind of shown up in that really horrific LBC interview where, you know, he doesn't feel able to actually call out the racism of the caller because he's scared, but he knows that he can't sort of outright agree. So he ends up just kind of flubbering like a malfunctioning robot, which is why I think that it would be very, you know, if I was on the Labour right or kind of the centre, I would think of myself as like, I would think, okay, we're going to have Keir Starmer to do this particular internal party work for now and then we'll put someone else up for election because he's now too branded with that kind of mealy mouthed cowardice, but for the purposes of what the establishment of the party have, you know, strategised for what their priorities are over the next few years, it's not to actually fight conservative policy and to actually improve outcomes for working class people in this country, it's to do that sort of cleaning house. So in a sense, he's kind of doing what he was put in there to do for now, not by the membership, but you know, by kind of the more establishment and the basis on which he has such broad support from most of the PLP. So as you say, Dahlia, the mainstream media has not really scrutinised Keir Starmer at all. They constantly give him the benefit of the doubt. I think the most clear example of this actually is the fact that when Jeremy Corbyn was suspended, no one really asked, are you sure there wasn't a deal? You know, actually not when he was suspended when the whip was removed from him. They didn't say, are you sure there wasn't a deal that readmitted him to the party and now you've just freaked out? It was, that clearly was, or it looks in all likelihood that there wasn't and no journalist asked him. If you are interested in people who do put Keir Starmer under some scrutiny, do subscribe to Navarra Media. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 p.m. and we'll be putting out a video every day over the Christmas break. As I said, we do put Keir Starmer under scrutiny. We do also like to be very fair about him. We're gonna go through some data about what the electorate think about Keir Starmer at the end of his first year in office. For now though, I wanna go to a clip from Wednesday. I mentioned this on Wednesday's show. It's from PMQs and I think it's really worth watching because it sums up where the lines of opposition between the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition have been drawn. As this is the last PMQs of the year, I, for one, often wonder where the Prime Minister gets his advice from. Well, now I know because I've heard the official newsletter of the Wellingborough Conservative Party. It's not on everyone's Christmas reading list but it is a fascinating read because it gives a lot of advice to wanna be politicians. It says this, say the first thing that comes into your head. It'll probably be nonsense. You may get a bad headline but if you make enough dubious claims fast enough, you can get away with it. And it includes the December edition, the advice. Sometimes it's better to give the wrong answer at the right time rather than the right answer at the wrong time. So my final question to the Prime Minister, is this, is he the inspiration for the newsletter or is he the author? Ladies and Speaker, I think what the people of this country would love to hear from the right Honourable Gentleman this season of The Will is any kind of point of view at all on some of the key issues. I mean, this week he couldn't make up his mind whether it was right for kids to be in school or not and havering completely. He couldn't make up his mind last week whether or not to support what the government was doing to fight COVID and told his troops heroically to abstain. He couldn't make up his mind about Brexit, you'll see, remember? We don't know whether he'll vote for a deal or not. Mr. Speaker, he can't attack the government. He can't attack the government if he can't come up with a view of his own. If he, Mr. Speaker, in the words of the song or from all I want for Christmas is a view. So I think that that two minutes really summarized what are the attack lines from Starmer against Johnson and the responses from Johnson to Starmer. They've been basically, I mean, they've crystallized throughout the year, haven't they? So Keir Starmer is trying to attack Boris Johnson as a not serious person, as incompetent and Boris Johnson is trying to attack Keir Starmer as someone who sits on the fence, someone who isn't really to be trusted, someone who doesn't necessarily stand for anything. I mean, presumably they've landed on those because they think they are the most effective. Let's see what the public think. So we've got some data from you, Governor and then from Ipsos Mori. So first of all, these are from you, Governor, showing us how the public's opinions have changed over the year. Now, this is Boris Johnson and incompetence. So you can see people have judged that Boris Johnson is fairly incompetent. There was a period in the middle of the year where they thought that potentially no, maybe he's decent at his job. I think that was maybe when they were giving him the benefit of the bat doubt when he'd gone into hospital. That's probably when they thought he was most competent when he was potentially unconscious. But they've ended the year where 52% of the population saying he's incompetent, 34% saying he's competent. On trustworthiness, Starmer is doing a little bit better than Boris Johnson, but he has also declined. His ratings have declined over the year. So now currently, 31% of the public think he's untrustworthy, 27% think he is trustworthy, though the drop is particularly pronounced among young people. So Kirsten almost started the year with plus 11 when it came to trustworthiness among 18 to 24 year olds, and he's now on minus 27. Now, this is a sub-sample, but it's still a couple of hundred people, I think. And you can see there that the shift is so big that it's clearly not just a statistical error. We can now go to the more general polling information from Ipsos. So this is the voting intention and how it has changed over the year. And what you will see here is that when Kirsten and Starmer is elected, Labour are quite a way behind. They have been rising since the general election, but or sort of more just before the general election, but he will be fairly happy with that. Labour and the Conservatives neck and neck at the moment, 41, 41, he has closed the gap. Now, you might argue this isn't just any year, the government have sort of overseen a ginormous deft hole and have been seen to deal with Brexit in a fairly incompetent fashion, but still, I mean, he's closed the gap there. You can also see now in terms of who is more satisfied or who the public are more satisfied with. So this is their satisfaction ratings. So as you can see there, Boris Johnson is on net minus eight, although it has improved over the year and Kirsten is on plus five. So Kirsten at the moment, people are more satisfied with how he is behaving in his job than Boris Johnson. The good news though for Boris Johnson is that there hasn't been much change over this year at all. He starts with sort of 5% more people thinking being dissatisfied with him than satisfied. And he ends with 8% of people being more dissatisfied than satisfied. So what you can see is even though he has overseen the deaths of 75,000 people, one of the highest deft holes in Europe, a lot down to sort of the terrible mistakes he made at the start of this pandemic. He ends the year as popular as he started it. Keir Starmer on the other hand, whilst his satisfaction ratings are higher than Boris Johnson on the whole, his ratings have gone in the opposite direction. So you can see that when he, in June in the summer, when he's one of the, I think that's probably the first survey since he became leader, you can see he's got a massive gap there. He's on plus 30 when it comes to satisfaction. And by the end of the year, he's only on plus five. So there has been a big shift there. So people's opinions of Boris Johnson are staying the same of Keir Starmer. They're a declining, even though Keir Starmer still is, or has more people satisfied in how he has operated than Boris Johnson. And I just want to, because we like to be very fair, that decline in satisfaction when it comes to Keir Starmer is not necessarily unusual or something which shouldn't be expected. A sharp decline in your popularity or the number of people who are satisfied with you seems to be fairly common for any opposition leader. So it seems to be that at the start of your term, people give you the benefit of the doubt and then they, you know, more people start to form negative opinions of you as the year goes on. So again, I assume he'd prefer it to be more the shape of Tony Blair who stayed fairly high throughout that. It doesn't seem like the end of the world. Dahlia, I want to put this to you. So obviously on this show, we've been fairly critical of Keir Starmer for his outrageous decision to suspend Jeremy Corbyn and then withhold the whip from him from abstaining on the spy cop's bill, abstaining on the bill which allowed people to break into national law when they're abroad, if it was five years ago. And then, I mean, just a laughable amount of abstentions on almost everything. But the public, you know, I think his team will probably be fairly happy at the end of this year. Their main intention was to get a decent first impression for Keir Starmer, for people to think, yeah, I could potentially see him as Prime Minister. He wanted to put clear water between himself and Jeremy Corbyn. He's kind of done that. He wanted to attack Boris Johnson as incompetent. He's kind of done that. I mean, do you not think they'll look at those poll results and think, yeah, we've done a good job? I mean, I think they probably will. And I think that that's because they have managed to kind of tick all the boxes that they are trying to do, which is to kind of remove vision, as it were, from the party. But I think that, you know, we have to take into context here that these numbers come from a time where Keir Starmer has really not been, not experienced the full kind of machinery or the full kind of context of what the media or the opposition might say. And it's kind of, and I think that's why we've seen a kind of hands-off approach, is it's because, as I said, that kind of focus on cleaning house and changing the party and not wanting to really be a player in the public sort of sphere, so as not to actually get into the dirty work of being tested by the media and by the opposition. But I think that the legacy of Keir Starmer will be that in the middle of a pandemic where Britain had objectively, other than the United States, had objectively the most catastrophic outcomes in the world. And in the midst of a Brexit negotiation that doesn't seem to have really moved that much in the past year and is causing the kind of scenes that we talked about earlier and in the context of, you know, levels of child poverty that are reaching to the point where UNICEF is actually having to come and intervene, that the Labour Party of Keir Starmer stood by and didn't really have much to say on that. So I don't know how long that might tarnish his brand if he was to go into an election with that legacy. But as I said, I think that his team have achieved the things that they wanted to achieve and they've managed to do it without as much attrition or focus from mainstream media, you know, from barely any kind of scrutiny from mainstream media. The question of whether that would be a sustainable strategy going into a general election is remains to be seen because I still do think that because the Conservatives hold so many of the apparatus of state power that an alternative model of power has to be developed in order for any kind of pro-working class party to get into power. So the question is, is that the kind of party that's going to be going into an election? And if it is, what strategy do they have other than to just sort of play chicken as it were, which is the strategy that Keir Starmer is following at the moment?