With the Just Stop Oil havoc, now we can see where Starmer’s loyalties REALLY lie

Tory grandee Michael Heseltine once described a verbose and vacillating Neil Kinnock as ‘not only a windbag but also a windsock’. 

The description is equally appropriate for the current Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, whose awkward speaking style is matched by his apparent desperation to show solidarity with every fashionable cause.

The trait has been highlighted this week by revelations that since 2014 Starmer’s party received donations worth no less than £1.5million from the environmental entrepreneur Dale Vince.

Vince also happens to be a major backer of the green protest group Just Stop Oil, a bunch of self-indulgent attention-seekers who have become increasingly notorious for disruptive antics that have inflicted misery on the ordinary law-abiding members of the public and real damage on our economy.

In recent days, its members have caused mayhem at the Chelsea Flower Show, the Premiership rugby final at Twickenham and the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield, as well as bringing traffic to halt in the heart of London with their sit-down or slow-walk protests.

By accepting vast sums of cash from an individual who has helped fund what these protesters get up to – including £20,000 for the management of Starmers’s own office – the Opposition leader has sunk to their level.

What makes this saga more troubling is that on Sunday it was reported that a future Labour government will ban any new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea, exactly the self-destructive approach demanded by Just Stop Oil. 

Given the erratic unreliability of renewables, Britain’s market will be dependent on oil and gas for decades to come, which makes his surrender to the hardline environmental lobby still more disastrous.

Starmer aspires to lead our country, yet on this issue he has exposed himself as economically illiterate. Even one of his allies said at the weekend that this stance on North Sea development is ‘crackers, reckless, vote-losing stuff’.

But his folly is compounded by hypocrisy where Just Stop Oil is concerned. Starmer once told LBC radio: ‘I am not a fan of that organisation. I think their actions are wrong.’ If he really felt like that, why has he allowed his party to be financially linked to the group?

In his opportunism, the Labour leader is fast becoming the Groucho Marx of British politics. ‘Here are my principles and if you don’t like them, I have others,’ said the great American comedian.

Starmer is turning that joke into the hallmark of his leadership. When transgender dogma was the Left-wing flavour of the month he was all for it. In November 2020, he grandly declared that ‘trans rights are human rights and your fight is our fight. The Labour Party stands proudly with the trans community’.

He even called for gender self-recognition, the very policy that has torn apart the Scottish Nationalist government in Edinburgh.

Yet he began to retreat when the implications of this ideology grew more apparent, particularly the threat to women’s rights. The result is Starmer has ended up tying himself in verbal knots, epitomised by his laughable statement that ‘99.9 per cent of women don’t have a penis’.

Starmer cannot see a noisy Left-wing bandwagon without trying to clamber on board. In June 2020, during the protests that followed the appalling death of George Floyd in the US, he displayed his support for the Black Lives Matter movement by having himself photographed taking the knee alongside his deputy Angela Rayner.

But before long he was distancing himself from BLM, following its calls to defund the police, saying it was ‘nonsense’ for the organisation to pursue such a path.

Part of Starmer’s difficulty stems from the conflict between his Left-wing impulses and his desire for power. Sensible pragmatism is at constant war with his wish to win the cheers of Labour’s core, middle-class, woke base.

So he joins in lawyerly protests against the deportation of foreign criminals, then he poses as a tough-minded crime fighter. He campaigns for Jeremy Corbyn to be made prime minister and praises him for ‘energising our movement’, then orchestrates Corbyn’s expulsion from the Parliamentary Labour Party.

He extols freedom of movement, then presents himself as the architect of tough border controls – just as he was Labour’s chief advocate of Remain even after the 2016 vote yet trumpets his commitment to democracy.

Like the Vicar of Bray in the comic opera, his outlook appears only to match the prevailing mood of the moment, never his inner convictions.

He is both for and against the repeal of tuition fees, the removal of jihadi bride Shamima Begum’s British citizenship, the legalisation of cannabis, private sector outsourcing in the NHS, and the abolition of universal credit.

But with each new U-turn or flip-flop, Starmer’s credibility fades and with each new submission to the woke mob his authority diminishes.