Summertime Blues

 It’s not been a good week for the Prime Minister. The latest opinion polls still put the Tories in the lead but the Labour leader is now near level-pegging with Boris Johnson on the personal approval ratings. Labour has joined the clamour calling for the former minister facing rape charges to be removed from the Tory party. Rumours abound about a future Tory leadership challenge from the ambitious new Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and Sir Kier Starmer has taken a break from his anti-Corbynista witch-hunt to give the Government a month to fix the broken COVID-19 test-and-trace system.

Starmer said the Prime Minister must admit his “world-beating” £10 billion system is flawed. “His repeated refusal to accept that test and trace isn’t functioning properly is a roadblock to fixing the issues and restoring public confidence”.      

Writing in the Guardian, the Labour leader called on the Johnson government to set out a clear plan to deal with the widely predicted second wave of the coronavirus plague. Starmer said there was “precious little evidence” of serious preparation for a resurgence in COVID-19 cases. Ministers have one month to make the track and trace system work and halt a devastating second wave of COVID-19 or Britain will face a “long and bleak winter” he said.

Johnson’s Rasputin, Dominic Cummings, may think he’s the master of deception but people, including the Tory die-hards of the Home Counties, are beginning to see through the smoke and mirrors these days.

Media reports of supposed Government plans to impose some sort of M25 no-go area around London and place everyone over 50 under virtual house arrest to contain a second wave have been met with outrage and derision, and the decision to appoint an official spokesperson to represent the Prime Minister in front of the media has only fired renewed speculation around Johnson’s health.

Some say Boris has never fully recovered from his bout with the coronavirus in April. Others repeat stories about Boris’s daily three-hour “power naps”, breathlessness and inability to concentrate that one would normally expect from the Labour ranks. The fact that they are going the rounds amongst disaffected Tories reflects their disquiet at the Government’s confused response to the coronavirus crisis that had paralysed the country.

 Banking on Biden

Meanwhile the Remainer camp is banking on Donald Trump’s defeat in the forthcoming US presidential elections. Johnson’s entire Brexit strategy has been based on replacing the Treaty of Rome with a new ‘Treaty of Washington’ that would open the British domestic market, including the NHS, to corporate America in exchange for preferential trans-Atlantic trade.

The Democrats have always favoured Britain’s continued membership of the European Union (EU), which enables their British-based investments to operate competitively within the EU. Johnson’s deal will be dead in the water if Trump’s Democratic rival, Joe Biden, wins.

That’s when they’ll call for the Brexit transition period to be extended to the end of this parliament’s five-year term whilst preparing for the ‘national government’ that Starmer thinks he’s immensely qualified to head. That will then pave the way for new negotiations with Brussels and the ‘second referendum’ of their hopes and dreams.

Johnson won’t be losing any sleep over Starmer in the immediate future. The new Labour leader has done little or nothing to restore Labour’s fortunes in its former bastions in Scotland or the North that are now in the hands of the Tories and the Scottish Nationalists. But Starmer is biding his time.