“It’s a tale of lame ducks and lemmings.” That is how Stephen Daisley opens his latest Daily Mail column, which sets the leadership troubles of Keir Starmer in Westminster and John Swinney in Edinburgh side by side. His verdict: the men who want to replace them are not an improvement.
Starmer won a landslide majority two years ago and is now apparently on his way out as Labour leader and prime minister. Andy Burnham, newly elected MP for Makerfield and a former mayor of Greater Manchester, is after the job. Daisley notes that Burnham has not yet offered a critique of Starmer’s record or laid out an alternative programme. Yet if polling is accurate, he writes, Labour members are ready to put Burnham in Number 10 on “vibes” alone. Members picked Starmer in 2020 on similar grounds, he argues, with vague, leftish soundbites.
Trouble in the SNP
Swinney’s hold on the SNP is also in question, Daisley says, after the Aberdeen South by-election. Douglas Lumsden took the seat from the Nationalists with a campaign built around oil and gas jobs. By Daisley’s account it was the first Scottish Tory gain in a Commons by-election since Glasgow Pollok in 1967, when Swinney was two years old. Swinney blamed tactical voting. “Sure, John,” Daisley writes, “but it was you they were tactically voting against.”
Stephen Flynn, seen as a contender for Swinney’s job, posted on Twitter on Friday morning that it was “a tough night in Aberdeen that some will need to reflect on, quite heavily.” Daisley points out that Flynn caused the by-election himself by leaving Westminster for Holyrood, which left his colleague Richard Thomson to defend a vote share of less than one-third. Flynn lost 12.5 per cent of the SNP’s vote in 2024, the columnist says, though it was Thomson’s 4.2 per cent drop that drew the reflection.
He also accuses Flynn of backing a “Janus-faced” party line on oil and gas: promising North Sea workers he would fight for their jobs while keeping faith with the Net Zero policy that threatens them.
Change in name only
Burnham talks constantly about “change”, Daisley writes, but the only change he appears to have in mind is the name of the Labour leader. On independence, he asks what Flynn knows that Nicola Sturgeon, Humza Yousaf and Swinney did not. Even with polls consistently showing a majority to leave the UK, he notes, a referendum would remain in Westminster’s gift.
On Labour’s problems, Daisley says Starmer’s difficulty has been the gap between his promises in opposition and what government has delivered. The root cause, he argues, is money. Labour cannot spend its way to popularity, he writes, because it is unwilling to cut spending elsewhere or raise the basic rate of income tax. Burnham would face the same fiscal limits in Number 10 and be “as unpopular as Starmer in short order.”
He calls both rivals graduates of “Mr Micawber’s School of Government: something will turn up.”
No defence of the incumbents
Daisley is not defending the two leaders. “Both are duds,” he writes, describing Starmer as having “the personality of a speed camera.” Swinney, in his telling, considers himself a giant but has no vision, ideas or inspiration. He says Swinney became First Minister because Yousaf’s premiership collapsed and SNP members refused to elect Kate Forbes.
Still, he writes, Starmer and Swinney are “hardly all that much worse” than Burnham and Flynn, whom he calls flimsy, narcissistic and unimpressive. He puts the blame on a political class from which, he says, anyone with wit and character was long ago drummed out.
The country faces real challenges on economic growth, immigration and national security, Daisley says, and needs leaders equal to them. In his words, “We have resigned ourselves to being governed by men with more ambition than ability.”
