‘Softy’ Starmer must find a nickname for Rishi Sunak

Rishi Sunak used the first post-Easter Prime Minister’s Questions to roll out a new nickname for the leader of the opposition: “Sir Softy” Starmer. Thus far, Sir Keir hasn’t returned the insult but he has recently launched some highly personalised attack ads on the prime minister’s record. As the election approaches, the tricks are getting dirtier and the public discourse coarser.

Will the new nickname stick?

It may not. Like all political advertising, it has to speak to some kind of truth, however vestigial, and when it fails to do so then it can make the attacker look ridiculous. Thus, very early in Tony Blair’s leadership, the Tories attempted to dub him “Bambi” because of liberal idealism and big eyes. Then when he started to beat up the trade unions, taking on the Left and the Tories simultaneously, they turned him into a horror movie monster with the infamous “demon eyes” poster. Peter Mandelson, running Labour’s long campaign, found a bishop to condemn the Tories for dabbling with diabolism, and that was that.

With Starmer, the Tories have actually been through a number of silly nicknames, designed to demean. The most successful was Captain Hindsight, which Boris Johnson deployed to some effect when Starmer was trying to criticise the government’s response to the coronavirus while supposedly only wise after the event (not always true). Then came the brief vogue for “Sir Beer Korma” after Starmer had supposedly been caught, beer-handed, breaking lockdown rules at a Labour Party meeting in Durham. That one died off when the Durham police decided the former director of public prosecutions had no case to answer. An even shorter career awaited Johnson’s possibly spontaneous description of Starmer as “Captain Crasheroonie Snoozefest”, which must have been designed to contrast Starmer’s dull attention to detail with Johnson’s swashbuckling ways of getting the big calls right. The blunter “pointless plastic bollard” was Johnson’s farewell present at their last PMQs.

On a visit to a Kellogg’s factory, Starmer once remarked that his nickname from birth had been Special K, after the insipid breakfast cereal – apparently unaware that it’s also a common expression for the horse tranquiliser ketamine, which can induce a deep sleep if taken by humans.

Is the ‘soft on crime’ tag justified?

The best that can be said is that it’s not entirely clear; this latest PMQs sounded more like Questions to the former Director of Public Prosecutions (2008-13) and degenerated into an argument about the proceedings of the sentencing committee more than a decade ago. Taking both lines of attack together, you’d hope that the British electorate is sensible enough to realise that neither Starmer nor Sunak are well-disposed to paedophiles.

Does negative campaigning work?

Yes. Much as the public professes to dislike it, such tactics do seem to work and deeply personalised attacks are not unusual. An unscientific survey of elections in the last century or so suggests extreme scares about the Labour Party from the Conservatives (and their close media allies) have been more prominent than those travelling in the opposite election. In 1924, for example, the forged Zinoviev letter suggesting a Bolshevik plot was about to be hatched helped to hasten the end of the first Labour government. At the 1945 election, Winston Churchill said in a radio broadcast that Labour would need a “Gestapo” to implement its policies.

Throughout the postwar period, notably in the “never had it so good” election of 1959, the governing Conservatives ran with variations of “Life’s Better Under the Conservatives – Don’t Let Labour Ruin It”. In the 1980s, Labour’s union allies were portrayed as “the enemy within”. Gordon Brown was openly mocked, while a miniature Ed Miliband was pictured in the pocket of SNP leader Alex Salmond in 2015. Johnson once chose to smear Starmer with an untruth about him letting Jimmy Savile off the hook. And the treatment of Jeremy Corbyn was so vicious it probably helped him harvest a sympathy vote. Margaret Thatcher in 1983 vetoed a Tory poster depicting Labour leader Michael Foot as a decrepit old man, but that was a rare exception to the rule that anything goes.

What does Sunak have to fear?

Quite a lot, whether fair or otherwise. In the last year, Sunak has had to face down a series of stories that did his reputation no favours. In April 2022, The Independent revealed that his wife, Akshata Murty, enjoyed non-dom tax status; that the family used offshore trusts; and that Sunak himself had retained his green card to work and reside in the US. More recently, he has had to answer criticism about the relatively modest tax bill on his income of £4.7m over the past three years. He has also had to pay two fixed penalty notices, one for Partygate and one for not wearing a seatbelt; and he is now being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards for not declaring an interest when asked to do so when he appeared before the Commons liaison committee.

So there’s plenty for Starmer and his attack dogs to sink their teeth into; curiously, Starmer at the moment seems not inclined to do so at their gladiatorial PMQs. Perhaps Starmer’s team hasn’t yet dreamed up a suitable sobriquet, though the term “snake” used by Boris Johnson might be a creative starting point.