Keir Starmer was part of the sabotaging conspiracy that engineered Labour’s defeat in the 2019 General Election. He and his co-conspirators in the Shadow Cabinet, Parliamentary Labour Party and Party headquarters staff, preferred to have a Tory government, rather than a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn. They brought about a coup.  With the media overwhelmingly on their side, they had no need to bring in the military, although they were prepared to do so, as indicated by their failure to slap down the generals who threatened to step in if Corbyn laid a finger on their precious atomic weapons.

Having got the Prime Minister they wanted, the Labour leadership have treated him with kid gloves.

The Opposition has been pathetically soft on Doris Johnson, confining their attacks to the Downing Street sleaze, about which the electors of Hartlepool cared little and Johnson was perturbed even less.

Johnson has been given a cushioned ride, despite his monumental failures during the pandemic.

The Tory government was deaf to the warnings of WHO and resisted firm action, lest it damaged their blessed big business interests.

There should have been immediate draconian measures to limit population mobility, but our borders were not closed and Heathrow and Gatwick continued as our ports of entry for the virus.

Not a word from Starmer.

The first UK Covid cases were detected on 31st January 2020.

Italy, France, Spain and Germany implemented total or partial lockdowns during February and March 2020.

Hardly a word from Starmer.

The UK  total lockdown started on 24th March, Doris having himself just caught a dose.

Lamentations and sympathy from Starmer, when it should have been: “Let’s hope you have learned the lesson.”

Those worst affected in the UK were front-line workers in hospitals, retail, care homes and transport and families in multi-occupied housing.

Thus the gross inequalities in society, which already existed, were becoming worse.

 

 

On 1st June 2020, Ruth May, NHS Chief Nursing Officer, was dropped from the Downing Street briefing at the last minute, because in the rehearsal she had declined to support Dominic Cummings in his lockdown-busting 520 mile trip to county Durham.

If Starmer knew about that, he certainly made nothing of it.

 

There were the panics over bed shortage, staff shortage, PPE shortage and ventilator shortage.

No surprise there.  There had been a decade of stringent austerity following the 2007-8 economic crisis, during which the NHS endured £1 billion, yes, £1 billion of cuts. The local infra structure of public health  –  built around local authority and NHS directors of public health  – had been dismantled, despite the growing and ageing population.

The shortages gave opportunity and excuse for Doris and his money-grubbing mates to dole out lucrative contracts to Tory-supporting cronies

Egregious corruption, but not a word from Starmer.

WHO’s recommendation was test, test, test.  The private companies engaged to perform this, proved to be useless, but they still trousered billions.

 

Little was heard from Starmer.

In 2016 there had been Exercise Cygnus, which found that the UK was ill-prepared for a pandemic.  The Tory government did nothing in response to the Cygnus findings and Starmer did not remind them of it when the 2020 pandemic brought the chickens home to roost.

Meanwhile, the Covid deaths were mounting, reported each day as cold figures, behind which there were family tragedies.

Starmer let Doris get away with his crocodile tears.

Some of the government’s scientific advisers, familiar from their daily appearances at the Downing Street lecturns, became obsequious apologists for the government.

 

Never a word of criticism from Starmer.  Doris had not sought a bipartisan approach to the pandemic, but that is what Starmer gave him, wrapped in cottonwool and cushioned in double bubble-wrap.

Then came the vaccines, mainly the work of public bodies.  Doris claimed all the credit for the roll-out, standing in front of the Union flag and repeatedly claiming Britain’s world-beating status.

Starmer’s response was to copy the fashion, wrapping himself in the flag and falling over himself to join in the obsequies for Prince Philip.

Meanwhile, with the end of lockdowns now in sight, no mention of the 128,000 Covid deaths.

*Wets was the label given by Margaret Thatcher to ministers she found to soft.