Keir Starmer’s worst mistake makes him unfit to be PM

The Covid-19 crisis was the most significant event of the last parliament. It had an immeasurable impact on our economy and society. And Labour’s record during that period, particularly in 2021, was appalling. Bad enough that many people said at the time that Starmer’s mistakes ruled him out of any possible future as prime minister.

Why then have Labour’s Covid-19 mistakes almost entirely escaped scrutiny during the campaign? Perhaps before we install them in power with a huge majority, we should remind ourselves what they look like?

At many stages of the pandemic, Labour has demanded more Boris Johnson’s government has imposed even tougher restrictions. It has opposed the gradual easing of restrictions in 2021 at almost every stage. While polls suggest that most voters supported further restrictions at almost every stage, and many doctors were in favour of it, once we get to mid-2021, the truly terrible, perhaps unforgivable, mistakes become clearer.

Johnson’s government finally lifted almost all the restrictions that had blighted our lives in mid-July 2021. Yet Keir Starmer denounced the move in an infamous speech that Labour shared widely on social media. In it, he said Johnson was reckless and that the surge in cases – which he had predicted, wildly inaccurately, would reach 100,000 a day – would become known as the “Johnson variant”, inevitably creating a summer crisis in the NHS and forcing millions into self-isolation.

It is rare that an opposition leader’s preferred policy can be definitively tested and said, with absolute certainty, to be right or wrong. This was one of those rare occasions. Starmer was not only wrong. He was spectacularly false. It would have kept the country under virtual house arrest for at least several more months. We now know that would have been unnecessary.

In almost any other circumstance, a party leader demanding that the country be subjected to clearly unnecessary authoritarian restrictions for several months would exclude that party from any government candidacy. Yet we seem to have simply forgotten this.

And Labour didn’t stop there. Throughout the autumn of 2021, the party repeatedly called for restrictions to be reimposed. For example, in October 2021, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves demanded that the government put in place a “Plan B” – including mandatory face masks and Covid passports – to counter what Labour repeatedly predicted (again, completely wrongly) would be a new surge of the delta variant.

In December 2021, a new variant, Omicron, finally caused a major surge of cases that were much milder than the Delta variant. And the government did introduce mandatory mask-wearing. In my view, this was completely unjustifiable, and I think the data clearly shows that I was right. But at least the Conservatives, for all their failures, held firm throughout the autumn of 2021 in the face of repeated calls from Labour to reintroduce restrictions. Labour would have banned your hobbies, forced you to wear masks and made us all carry health passports, not to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths, but rather to try to stop the NHS from getting a bit overloaded – a prediction that didn’t even come true!

At the start of the pandemic, there were many political mistakes made by all parties as they sought to deal with a situation that no one in the UK had ever experienced in living memory. But by mid-2021, there was no excuse. Starmer denounced the easing of restrictions. He was wrong. Labour demanded that restrictions be reimposed, month after month. He was wrong.

This was not a mistake about the precise rules for digging a road, keeping bees or selling replica football shirts. This was not about subtle judgements about ideal macroeconomic management or questionable trade-offs between tax and public spending. This was about a major party demanding that our lives be ruined beyond recognition, for many more months, with no apparent justification. These were monumental, repeated and persistent mistakes that, had Labour been in power, would have had enormous consequences for us all.

We are prepared to punish the Conservatives for their many failings and the Reform Party for the troubled past of its candidates. Are we prepared to forgive the Labour Party for much more serious mistakes that could have damaged our lives?