FRIDAYS are usually quiet in Westminster. The empty stone corridors, usually bustling, fall silent bar the lonely echo of solitary footsteps.
But this Friday was even quieter than usual. Perhaps it was because Keir Starmer had convened an emergency Cabinet awayday, reportedly in the plush setting of Lancaster House, just down the road from Buckingham Palace. Nice gaff!
Labour have obviously not billed this as a crisis meeting or an emergency measure. But reality tells a slightly different story.
It took a minor revolt by lobby journalists to even get a perfunctory rundown of what was discussed out of Number 10 – with veteran political hack Christopher Hope saying that the “secrecy is unacceptable”.
Before the event, we were told that there will be a regular Cabinet meeting – which is attended by politically neutral civil servants – followed by a “political” Cabinet, giving ministers the opportunity to look at the bigger picture.
It ain’t a pretty picture. Labour are plummeting in the polls. Energy minister Michael Shanks gamely tried to defend the seven-month-old Government’s record in an agonising Question Time performance on Thursday night, admitting that he was “acutely aware” of how unpopular some decisions had been.
And in an illuminating article in The Spectator, the magazine’s editor Michael Gove paints a picture of what looks like a civil war being fought behind closed doors in No 10.
Admittedly this is a story told through the eyes of a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, for whom Labour’s fortunes will inevitably be improved by sticking with the vision of Starmer’s puppet master Morgan McSweeney – upon whose Irish republican heritage Gove seems inordinately fixated.
Gove fears that Starmer is being led astray by his more natural bedfellows, the softy lefty lawyer types, embodied in Attorney General Richard Hermer (below), described by hard right poster boy Robert Jenrick as “Corbyn in a barrister’s wig”.
Zooming out even further, Labour’s ten pledges, five pillars, four noble truths or whatever they were called seem to have been junked or, more likely, forgotten.
Economic observers are now discussing the increasingly realistic prospect of stagflation depressing us and the economy even further, while Ed Miliband tied himself in knots on the Friday morning broadcast round trying to explain why energy bills are going up when Labour said they’d go down.
I for one would not like to be a Labour Cabinet minister right about now. I can tell you even more emphatically I would not like to be locked in an old stately home with several of them trying to work out whether there are enough buckets to bail out their sinking ship.
From the political readout given to journalists under duress, we glean that Starmer took aim at Nigel Farage, saying that his government was “on the side of working people”, adding: “While right-wing populists also claim to be, all they offer is grievances not solutions.”
Elsewhere, he expressed the slightly candid fear that the world was “speeding up” and could leave them behind in the dust.
That’s if that hasn’t already happened, with Trump (above) smashing and remaking the world order with the stroke of his pen.
As tantalising as these nuggets are, we can’t know the precise details of private conversations that take place behind closed doors.
Perhaps they didn’t discuss policy at all. In truth, they’d have been better off doing teambuilding exercises.
I’d have recommended they practice some trust falls. They look like they’re going to have to get used to precipitous drops.
