Marie Antoinette never actually said, ‘Let them eat cake’. However, the Right Honourable Baroness Morgan of Ely, the first minister of Wales, really did say, ‘If people want [local] businesses to succeed, they need to use them, stop buying online, get out of their homes, and stop watching Netflix. They need to stop buying that bottle of wine and go out to the pub.’

Needless to say, those businesses in question, most notably local pubs, are suffering as a direct result of specific policies of Labour administrations in both Westminster and Cardiff Bay. It is therefore pure gaslighting to blame the people – especially in Wales, where the choice for many people outside the public-sector bubble is not between Netflix, or bottles of wine, or overpriced beer at struggling pubs, but between buying basic groceries or keeping the central heating on during winter.

Eluned Morgan’s statement perfectly captured the outlook of an out-of-touch political class lacking all understanding of those it is ruling and meant to be representing. It is why what was meant to be impossible is likely to happen in May: Labour will almost certainly lose Wales.

The Welsh Assembly, now known officially as the Senedd, was designed specifically so that this could never happen. Even if Labour did not win an absolute majority, the electoral system, combined with the cultural incompatibility of the opposition parties, seemed to ensure that the administration would always be Labour-led. This has been the case ever since the assembly’s first day in 1999, even when the Labour share of the vote fell below 30 per cent. It was on this understanding that New Labour established it in the first place – to ensure Labour would always have a power base in Wales, no matter how badly it was doing in the UK as a whole.

That is almost certain to change after the next election in May. Labour is now running a distant third in the Welsh opinion polls behind Plaid Cymru and Reform UK. The latest YouGov poll actually has Labour in joint-fifth place, behind the Greens, on just 10 per cent, in a statistical tie with the Conservatives. Let that sink in: Labour, which basically owned Wales for the past century, is struggling for fifth place against the Conservatives… in Wales.

To be fair, it is not Morgan’s fault, even if she has done nothing to stop the slide. The Titanic-like final plunge in the polls is to a great extent a reflection of a similar collapse in Labour support all over the UK. Only a quarter of Welsh people who voted Labour at the 2024 General Election currently say they will vote for it in May. Labour may bounce back a little if Sir Keir goes. An actual fifth place in Wales is unlikely – but not as unlikely as it rising above third as things stand.

Even without the Starmer factor, the solid Labour base in Wales has been crumbling for some time now. Welsh Labour has now had more than a quarter of a century to put what it calls ‘clear red water’ between Cardiff Bay and Westminster, and the results have not been good. Those who supported the establishment of the assembly in the 1997 referendum, and have controlled it ever since have failed miserably to deliver on their promises. Wales has fallen further behind England in terms of most of the accepted indicators of economic development, health and education since 60 elected Welsh politicians replaced the single Westminster-appointed secretary of state hitherto in charge of Welsh public services. The imposition of the widely hated 20mph speed limit sums up the image of Wales as a nation stuck in the slow lane.

The fight to replace Labour is between Plaid Cymru and Reform UK. The public mood is not settled but YouGov polling is probably accurate in putting Plaid well ahead. Ill-informed commentators attribute this to a putative surge in support for Welsh independence, based on a survey last year claiming that 41 per cent now support it. However it turns out that this figure was a proportion of ‘decided’ voters only, with only 35 per cent of all Welsh voters in favour, and 50 per cent against. A YouGov poll last month has since reduced the proportion of all voters in favour of independence from 35 per cent to 26 per cent, closer to the norm in recent years. It is significant that Plaid itself is downplaying independence as an issue in its election campaign.

Plaid’s real advantages are organisation and leadership. It was a strong local organisation on the ground that led to Plaid’s victory over Reform in last October’s Caerphilly by-election. In Rhun ap Iorwerth, Plaid has a leader with polished media skills thanks to his years as a supposedly neutral political commentator with BBC Wales – which tells you all you need to know about BBC Wales.

By contrast Reform has little ground game and no real Welsh leadership. Nigel Farage’s belated appointment of Dan Thomas, a former leader of a London borough council, as nominal head of the party in Wales last week was a triple mistake. (This is no disrespect to the individual in question, about whom I, like everyone else in Wales, knows nothing – which itself is a problem.)

The first mistake is the fact he was appointed rather than elected, which plays into the narrative that Reform is essentially one man’s ego trip. The second is that he was until very recently a Conservative, playing into the narrative that Reform is a refuge for the people who misgoverned the UK for 14 years. And the third is that he is essentially an English politician, playing into the narrative that Reform is an English nationalist party – unsurprisingly, this does not go down well in Wales.

One is reminded of the folly of the Conservative governments appointing a chain of English secretaries of state for Wales in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Most were competent, and at least one was very good, but that was not enough to overcome the impression that London viewed Wales as a colony best governed from London because none of the natives was up to the job. The once considerable Conservative local base in Wales shrivelled during this time and never recovered. Reform is making exactly the same unforced error.

One can only imagine what Reform’s existing activists in Wales think about this collective slap in the face. It is worth noting that, contrary to stereotype, many Reform supporters are Welsh speakers and most probably consider themselves patriotically Welsh.

There is still one strong card Reform could play: it should come out unequivocally in favour of abolishing the Senedd altogether, or at least holding a referendum on the possibility. The last proper opinion poll on the question suggested that just under a third of Welsh voters would favour this. The precedent of the EU referendum suggests that this figure would increase dramatically if abolition was turned from a vague possibility not really worth considering properly into a viable proposition. It is fair to say that the assembly, as it is still generally known, is not embedded deeply in the affections of the Welsh people.

Indeed, the single-issue Abolish the Welsh Assembly Party won nearly four per cent of the vote at the last Senedd election in 2021. A singularly ignorant professor of politics at an assembly-funded university proclaimed that this was proof that the people supported the assembly. As anyone who really knows politics could tell him, most votes are almost inevitably cast for the big parties which are the only serious contenders, either for tribal reasons or for pragmatic reasons, because a vote for anyone else is wasted. For a tiny, underfunded single-issue party with no mainstream media support to get almost four per cent is therefore a remarkable achievement, hinting at more widespread dissatisfaction.

Compare that with the just over three per cent won by the Eurosceptic Referendum Party in the 1997 General Election. It took nearly two decades, but there was eventually a referendum on EU membership, and the majority of Brits supported Leave. Great oaks really do grow from little acorns. Reform could do the same in Wales, calling for a referendum on the Senedd’s future, and it would take a lot less time than Brexit did. Abolishing the assembly would be something tangible, something big, not just the usual hackneyed promises to ‘cut waste’.

In the meantime, Reform would benefit from a simple bit of psephological arithmetic. The third of Welsh voters who favour abolition are more numerous than the quarter who are currently likely to vote Reform in Wales according to that latest YouGov poll. A firm commitment to abolition would therefore make Reform look more attractive to an additional chunk of the electorate. It could be a game changer in the May election.

Otherwise, Plaid is likely to emerge as the largest party in May. With the support of the Greens, with whom it has very strong ties in Wales, Plaid is likely to be able to form an administration. If there are insufficient Greens elected, there remains the option of a deal with the remnants of Welsh Labour.

Politically, Plaid and Welsh Labour are in any case not that far apart. Welsh Labour’s ‘clear red water’ strategy aligns neatly with Plaid’s own radical leftward shift. Plaid has collaborated with Labour before. Since Labour has rarely enjoyed an absolute majority, it has usually governed with open or tacit support from Plaid. It might be Labour’s turn to repay the favour. And so Labour might not be as politically dead as it deserves to be after all.

The coming catastrophe for Welsh Labour and a glorious triumph of Plaid Cymru would not really change much for most people in Wales. Unless Plaid or Labour try to spring a populist surprise at the last moment, their policies and attitudes are basically the same. Anyone hoping for genuine change is likely to be disappointed.

Then again, how can we be disappointed when we never really expected anything else? Such is the fatalistic mood across the spectrum in Wales, 27 years into devolution.

John Winterson Richards is a writer on Welsh affairs and author of The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Welsh.

The real Keir Starmer. That, we’re told, is what we’re in for, now that the embattled PM is embarking upon what feels like the 47th ‘reset’ of his 19-month rule.

Starmer is the Windows 95 prime minister, requiring endless reboots just to stay functioning. But it certainly feels different this time around. His last, juddering stand while Labour MPs ponder when, not if, to oust him.

With the departure of chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and chief mandarin Chris Wormald, No10 spinners insist Starmer is now free to be true to his values and deliver for Britain. The problem is that Starmer seems to have few principles to speak of and no idea what he’s doing.

At a pseudo-event in Welwyn Garden City this week, Starmer tried to paint his government as Proper Labour, focussed on the ‘cost of living’ and led by the ‘most working-class cabinet in the history of this country’.

The working classes still haven’t got the memo. Labour now polls in third place among blue-collar Brits, with Reform UK commanding a double-digit lead and the Tories clinging on in second. Labour is, however, the most popular party among the privately educated.

Indeed, one of the few historic achievements of this generation of Labourites is severing the long-fraying link between their party and the working classes. Starmer, in his role as shadow (anti-)Brexit secretary during the Jeremy Corbyn years, is more culpable than most.

And if this is the most ‘working class’ cabinet in history, it doesn’t reflect the longer, historical trend of plummeting worker representation in the Commons, driven almost entirely by the colonisation of the Parliamentary Labour Party by lawyers, think-tankers and the Third Sector.

This is a clue as to why Labour not only routinely scorns and ignores the concerns of working-class people, but also embraces policies diametrically opposed to their interests – such as paying vast sums of money to keep people locked out of work on welfare or making energy more expensive to give Ed Miliband a warm feeling. Best of luck on tackling the cost of living, Keir.

Starmer’s pitch for power was all about technocratic delivery – hence, those interminable speeches setting out his ‘missions’, to be measured against ‘milestones’, all anchored by the ‘foundation stones’ of ‘economic security, national defence and secure borders’.

We can now see how that turned out. Housebuilding is in its deepest downturn since Covid, defence chiefs are near-mutinous over insufficient spending, and those gangs remain stubbornly unsmashed. Last year, small-boats crossings hit a near-record high.

Whether or not Labour actually wants to smash them is far from clear. Still, for a man who prides himself on process, Starmer appears to be across all the wrong details, even fussing about the dress code for meetings, if the insider accounts are to be believed. ‘You’d get a note the night before a meeting telling everyone to make sure they’re wearing smart casual’, one Downing Street source recently told Tim Shipman of the Spectator.

If it isn’t the working class, or managerial prowess, what does this Labour Party stand for? On current evidence, the only thing that unites the Labourites is their glee in calling critics of mass immigration racist – be they Nigel Farage or Manchester United part-owner Jim Ratcliffe. Apparently, more than a decade of this tactic backfiring spectacularly – sending former Labour areas into the arms of the pro-Brexit right – hasn’t killed their buzz.

It’s not that Starmer’s Labour doesn’t have its views on the world. Like much of the liberal left, it is wedded to all of the worst orthodoxies of the age. But even so, it all feels reflexive, inherited, vibes-based. And so their shibboleths crumble under even modest scrutiny, as seen in their comical responses to any hack who asks if a woman can have a penis. They cling to greenism or wokism or whatever not out of any deep thinking, but a desperation to appear purposeful and virtuous.

That Keir Starmer ever became leader of the Labour Party is a damning indictment of the Labour Party. But the current challengers vying to replace him remind us he is hardly a pygmy among giants. Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham – they may, unlike Starmer, appear to have a pulse. But they have no answers to the crises confronting us, offering up either New Labour nostalgia or the warm bath of soft-leftism.

The Keir Starmer premiership has shown you cannot ‘deliver’ in politics if you have no politics in the first place, and you cannot empower the working classes if you consider them to be either bigots or charity cases or both. Starmer has proven to be a truly woeful prime minister. On that front alone, he has surpassed expectations. But he is the leader that Labour – a party that no longer knows who or what it is for – deserves.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_.

The exhaustion of Keir Starmer’s Labour government has certainly been far quicker than that of the New Labour administrations of the 1990s and 2000s. But the parallels are unmistakable.

Both New Labour and its Starmer-fronted retread pitched themselves to voters as virtue incarnate, making almost identical pledges to restore trust in politics after years of Tory ‘sleaze’ – a catch-all pejorative for a whole range of misbehaviour, from financial impropriety to marital infidelity. And yet almost no sooner had they both entered Downing Street, than they found themselves up to their necks in their own lakes of sleaze.

For the fast-forwarded descent of Starmer’s Labour to so closely mirror the years-long fall of Blair’s New Labour is no quirk of history. Nor is it solely attributable to the central role played in both administrations by New Labour figures, especially the now disgraced Labour bigwig and certified sleaze magnet, Peter Mandelson. It’s more significant than that. It is a testament to modern Labour’s fundamental problem with sleaze.

The Labour Party we know today emerged during the 1990s as a very different beast to its earlier 20th-century versions. Under Tony Blair’s leadership, it had set about ‘modernising’ itself – a process of jettisoning the last remaining vestiges of Labour’s ‘old left’ past in order to bring it bang up to date with the post-Cold War world. This was to be a party free, as Tony Blair put it in 1997, of ‘out-dated ideology or doctrine’. A post-political party committed to managerialism rather than socialism. A party determined to administer businesses and society alike, to regulate and audit through quangos and other unaccountable, expert-stuffed bodies. It was a technocratic ‘Third Way’ project entirely of a piece with the ethos of globalism then emerging, in which decision-making was being shifted away from national electorates and towards those who knew best in transnational institutions, such as the EU and the World Trade Organisation.

But there was another key aspect of New Labour, which is of particular relevance right now. Namely, that at the same time as it was ‘modernising’ and embracing managerialism, it was also constructing itself as the ‘anti-sleaze’ party, the Party of the Virtuous.

Within months of John Major’s Conservative Party winning the 1992 General Election, his government’s popularity plummeted after the collapse of the pound following Britain’s withdrawal from the European exchange-rate mechanism – a process that was meant to pave the way for Britain’s adoption of what would become the Euro. The following year, Major attempted to resurrect his party’s fortunes by calling for a return to a ‘conservatism of a traditional kind’: ‘We must go back to basics and the Conservative Party will lead the country back to those basics right across the board: sound money, free trade, traditional teaching, respect for the family and the law.’

‘Back to basics’, as this vision came to be known, wasn’t meant to be a reference to personal or private morality. But that is how the press eagerly interpreted it. This provided the tabloids with an excuse to reveal all the sordid affairs and sexual shenanigans that had long been gathering dust in journalists’ files. At the time, it seemed barely a week passed without a red-top tale of bed-hopping Tories, from David Mellor to Tim Yeo, failing to live up to their own party’s supposedly puritanical values.

By 1994, the respectable broadsheet press was getting in on the act, focussing less on sex-capades and more on dodgy financial dealings. The most notorious of which was the cash-for-questions affair, in which the Guardian alleged (rightly as it eventually turned out) that Tory MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith had received money from Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed in return for asking questions on his behalf in the Commons.

The respectable media, staffed by many who long harboured a distaste for the Tories, feasted on their myriad personal failings, tarring it all with the broad brush of ‘sleaze’. As a 1994 piece for the high-brow London Review of Books had it, ‘The Tories are of course the party of sleazeocracy’.

It was perhaps not fully grasped at the time, but British political culture was undergoing a profound shift. It was effectively being re-oriented around personal conduct, rather than political ideas. It mattered less what a politician stood for, than how personally virtuous they could appear.

This was captured best by what happened in the Cheshire constituency of Tatton at the 1997 General Election. The incumbent MP Neil Hamilton, the Tory junior minister at the centre of the cash-for-questions affair, refused to stand down. And so both Labour and the Lib Dems agreed to withdraw their own candidates to allow an independent candidate to face off against Hamilton. This independent candidate in question was BBC war correspondent Martin Bell, who had pledged at a press conference to remove the ‘poison in the democratic system’.

Bell wasn’t a traditional politician at all – he had no party and no policies. He was a pompous, moralistic gesture stuffed into a tellingly white suit – the crass symbolism of which he had made famous while reporting on the war in Bosnia, before bringing it to the streets of Tatton. He effectively set up the General Election for Tatton voters not as political choice, but as a moral one. A chance to side with good over evil, the pure over the tainted, the white-suited man from the BBC over the wicked Tory.

While Bell may have become the poster boy of the anti-sleaze crusade, it was Labour that became its party-political wing. As a complement to its post-political managerialism, its leading figures adopted an intensely personal, moralistic style – think of it as ‘high sanctimonious’. Shadow foreign secretary Robin Cook would be condemning the Tories as a ‘government that knows no shame’ one week, before Blair himself would be talking of being ‘tough on sleaze and tough on the causes of sleaze’ the next. As The Economist said of the 1997 General Election, ‘the word [“sleaze”] was on the lips of every Labour candidate’.

New Labourites, immersed in managerialism, no longer bothered promoting a vision of the good life; they pushed themselves forward as good people instead. They were the virtuous ones, the Elliot Nesses of the British political scene – ‘purer than pure’, as Blair once put it. And, in turn, the Tories were cast as perpetual wrongdoers, the vice-ridden ones.

Through the idea of ‘sleaze’ pushed and promoted by the media, Labour was refashioning itself for the post-political, post-class age – and reframing party politics in the process. It was no longer a contest over the economy, a battle between two still relatively distinct visions of the future, grounded on relatively clear social constituencies. It was now a contest between good people and bad people, a battle between clean and the dirty, a fight to restore public standards, integrity etc, etc.

This wasn’t just a moral performance. Labour were also determined to institutionalise this anti-sleaze crusade. ‘We will change the law to make the Tories clean up their act’, Blair pledged in 1996. And that’s what New Labour did when it finally won power in 1997, promising, as the new prime minister did on that sunny day in May nearly three decades ago, ‘to restore trust in politics in this country… [to] clean it up [and give] people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public’.

To this end, Labour set about installing the ethos of anti-sleaze within the state. Building on the new ‘code of conduct’, introduced in 1996 by the equally new Committee on Standards in Public Life, Labour also strengthened the ministerial code in 1997, even creating the role of ‘independent adviser on ministerial standards’ to advise on said code in 2006. It also enacted various anti-sleaze measures under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.

This was New Labour. A combination of managerialism and personal moralism. A party that positioned itself beyond politics, as an almost ethical force full of Good People. A government that was determined to create new rules and procedures, overseen by unelected experts, to hold the bad, ‘sleazy’ Tories to account.

And almost from the moment Blair stepped across the threshold of No10 on 2 May 1997, it all backfired. Labour found itself hoist by its own moralistic petard. By the autumn of 1997, Labour was already facing several allegations of sleazy conduct. Mohammed Sarwar, MP for Glasgow Central (and father of current Scottish Labour leader Anas) had been suspended from parliament over bribery allegations. Liverpool West Derby MP Bob Wareing was found guilty of failing to register financial interests. And Robin Cook, a particularly self-righteous New-ish Labourite, was caught having an affair with his personal assistant. More troubling still, it also emerged that Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone had given Labour a £1million donation and, seemingly in return, Labour exempted Formula One from its ban on tobacco advertising.

As the years passed, New Labour continued to wrack up the sleaze allegations. Alongside countless marital infidelities and the usual sexual shenanigans, there were significant donations from porn baron Richard Desmond and eccentric businessman Richard Abrahams, all seemingly made in an attempt to influence government policy in some unspecified way.

Then there were ‘Tony’s cronies’, the press’s epithet for those supporters and donors Labour attempted to reward for their loyalty and cash with peerages. Indeed, it was Labour’s ultimately thwarted attempt to grant access to the upper house for those willing to cough up that led to the cash-for-honours scandal, complete with a police investigation and a two-time interview under caution for Blair. This, lest one forget, serenaded Blair’s exit from government in 2007. As the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley put it at the time: ‘[Blair] will be seen with John Major as a prime minister whose time in office was punctuated, despoiled and diminished by scandal.’

On top of all this, there was Peter Mandelson, sacked twice during the New Labour years. First in 1998, for failing to declare a £373,000 loan from his wealthy friend and then paymaster general, Geoffrey Robinson. Then in 2001, after he’d been exposed helping out millionaire Labour donor Srichand Hinduja with a passport application.

The shady financial transactions, the cash for influence and the attempts on the part of the wealthy to curry favour seemed far in excess of anything that happened during the Tory years of so-called sleaze. As John Major pointed out in 2007, the Tory scandals of the mid-1990s were characterised by individual misbehaviour, be it sexual or financial. Labour’s scandals of the 2000s were of an altogether different order, he said. ‘The sleaze has seemed to be systemic since 1997.’

Major wasn’t wrong. The party of the Good People, the political wing of the anti-sleaze crusade, appeared to be just as sleazy, if not more so, than its opponents.

Partly this was because New Labour, supported by the respectable media, had politicised ‘individual misbehaviour’, as Major had it, in ways it never had been before. New Labour had spent the 1990s personalising and moralising politics, foregrounding the putative good character of its own, while demonising the character of its opponents. They were presented not just as people with whom Labourites disagreed, but as bad, immoral people. Then, once in power, it had started creating an anti-sleaze regime within the state itself – a system of rules and procedures, adjudicated on by unelected, unaccountable advisers and bodies. This undermined elected politicians, empowering and authorising non-democratic, quasi-judicial actors at their expense. It effectively institutionalised distrust of elected politicians, by suggesting that they were not capable of acting responsibly without the threat of external sanction. In this way, it created a rod for Labour’s own back.

Perhaps Blair et al might have gotten away with it if their back wasn’t so seemingly crooked. But that was never going to be the case. Firstly, because as James Heartfield insightfully argued at the time, politics and the market are always inextricably intertwined. To do just about anything – from building and maintaining infrastructure to procuring supplies for schools and hospitals – the government needs to work with the market, contracting and outsourcing to private-sector actors. What’s more, this was the New Labour era of private-finance initiatives (PFIs), countless business forums and an ever-expanding quangocracy. The increasingly complex relationship between politics and business meant that there was, and still is, always space for a ‘favour’ or two, or a deal between ‘friends’.

More importantly perhaps, the Labour Party itself needed cash. New Labour was not just a post-political, post-class party in theory, it was also increasingly one in practice. By the late 1990s, Labour, like the Tories, had ceased to be a mass-membership movement. Having numbered some one million members (even excluding affiliated trade-union members) in the mid-20th century, Labour’s membership had shrunk to just 300,000 by 2001. Facing a funding shortfall (modern parties need a lot of capital for campaigning and staff), New Labour was always going to be increasingly reliant on large donations. As the governing party, it was also attractive to those seeking to exert a bit of influence. It’s worth bearing in mind that part of the reason for Peter Mandelson’s unflushability rested with his talent for ‘networking’ – in other words, bringing in the cash.

New Labour may have been a party forged in the crusade against Tory ‘sleaze’. But by the end of its time in government, crowned with the 2009 MPs’ expenses scandal, the stench of its own sleaze became unbearable.

What’s remarkable about Starmer’s Labour is the extent to which that same party, re-purposed during the 1990s for a post-political age, has lived on. It remains managerialist in ideology and globalist in outlook. And if anything, it is more intensely, performatively moralistic than its New Labour predecessor.

During its time in opposition, Starmer’s party was suffused with that same, high-sanctimonious style that typified the early New Labour years. Starmer himself often spoke as if it was still 1995, declaring in 2021 that ‘sleaze is at the heart of this Conservative government’ – this after the entirely forgettable ‘scandal’ involving former prime minister David Cameron’s unsuccessful attempt to get the government to help out finance firm Greensill Capital, before it duly collapsed. Time and again, Starmer struck the same pious, ‘purer than pure’ tone. Ahead of the General Election two years ago, Starmer positioned Labour just as Blair did, as anti-sleaze crusaders. ‘We need to clean up politics’, he declared, adding, ‘I will restore standards in public life’.

He even appointed as his chief of staff Sue Gray, the former head of the Propriety and Ethics team in the Cabinet Office, and the civil servant responsible for investigating prime minister Boris Johnson and the Partygate scandal. Starmer viewed her less as a politico than an incorruptible, sitting above the tawdry affairs of parliament. She was the ideal symbol of Starmer’s government of the self-righteous. As it turned out, she was less ideal for the actual art of governing, and had to quit within months of arriving in No10.

Labour’s supporting cast members have been even more inclined to see themselves as the Good People, morally superior to their opponents. Rachel Reeves, now the chancellor, would talk of ‘rebuilding fragile trust in politics as a force for good’. Angela Rayner, Starmer’s former deputy and arguably the leading contender to replace him, didn’t just regard the Tories as ‘scum’. She also spent much of her time in opposition poring over the tax affairs of her ‘sleazy’ Tory opponents, looking for further signs of their bad, scummy character.

Labour’s 2024 election manifesto declared that ‘Labour will end the chaos of sleaze’. It even promised to build on the existing New Labour-era anti-sleaze regime through the creation of an independent Ethics and Integrity Commission to further hold parliamentarians to account. And on 5 July that year, Starmer entered Downing Street, much as Blair did nearly three decades before, pledging to restore trust in politics.

At points Starmer et al’s rhetoric sounds like a Blair-era rip off. The talk of Labourites’ ‘integrity’, their ‘decency’, their commitment to ‘public service’, could have come from 1997. But it is not 1997 anymore. This version of Labour was forged at the dawn of an era that is now fast drawing to a close. Its managerialism, its technocratic impulses, its globalist tendencies, are no longer fit for the new world now emerging. And the contradictions between its moralism and its money-grubbing reality, between its high-horse-riding and the party’s need for cash, are far more intense now than they were then. So it’s no wonder we’ve seen Starmer’s Labour government consumed by its preening hypocrisy far faster than perhaps anyone expected.

The ‘freebies’ scandal, in which Labour frontbenchers were revealed to have accepted some £200,000 in free gifts, broke almost as soon as the Starmers had moved into Downing Street. It’s been downhill ever since. Labour MPs arrested. A chancellor accused of fibbing on her CV. Cronyism seemingly rife among civil-service appointments. Angela Rayner forced to resign over a seeming tax dodge on a second property. Huge multi-million donations coming into Labour coffers from dubious sources. And of course, the obligatory Peter Mandelson scandal, in which it is alleged the now ex-British ambassador to the US was passing on market-sensitive information to financier and world-famous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein some 17 years ago.

Modern Labour’s ‘sleaze’ problem is not a bug, but a feature. Which is a big problem for a party that, for the past three decades, has grounded its authority, indeed its electoral appeal, on being morally superior to its right-wing opponents. That’s why with every scandal, every misplaced hire, Labour’s authority depletes further.

Washed into power on a wave Tory sleaze nearly three decades ago, Labour is now itself being washed out again on a sleazy wave of its own making.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.