A second dollop today

In a perverse way, the Labour Party’s best strategy currently is to cheer the Tories on. The more Johnson and Co. dig themselves into a hole, the more in theory we the opposition can benefit from the public’s reaction to that deep pit of despond we are all being plunged into. I suppose it’s an approach familiar to the Socialist Workers (sic) Party and Leninists everywhere. In a milder form, it’s the old saw that governments lose elections, oppositions don’t win them. Polls in the US suggest that this hypothesis will play out well for Joe Biden in November’s presidential election. Trump’s polarisation of support has left him it seems with a greater number of ‘enthusiastic’ supporters than Biden has garnered, but Biden can count on many more enthusiastic opponents of Trump—offsetting the relative lack of his own ‘enthusiastic’ supporters (all this stuff analysed on the FiveThirtyEight website). These sort of considerations will have an impact on those highly paid political advisors who hang around in the shadows of our own political system. Their judgements will weigh heavily on the media orientated behaviour of their frontsmen. Is it a mere coincidence that shortly after Trump began extolling the use of face masks, our own Johnson confessed that his government may have poorly assessed how the Coronavirus was spreading? What political signalling is going on here? A little (possibly too late) show of attrition to appease those who are still undecided about the incompetence of our Liar-in-Chief? I have to say that with this backdrop, had Corbyn still been Labour Leader media pundits would all be having a field day telling us how many open goals Jeremy had missed at PMQs. As it is, Starmer is a wondrous hero of forensic questioning (but he might perhaps remember that new leaders from the centre left-right generally have honeymoon periods) It will only take one (amazing) Johnson big success to put Labour on its back foot. I’ve not seen any evidence that Starmer is preparing for this possibility.