Never, since Ian Duncan Smith became Conservative leader two days after 9/11, has the election of a new Leader of the Opposition been so overshadowed by events. Coronavirus meant there was even less attention on Keir Starmer’s arrival than expected. The long Labour leadership contest started in early January, before Coronavirus had even been heard of. It bridged the gap not just between two leaders, but between two epochs.
As I write, both Labour’s poll ratings and Starmer’s leadership ratings are rising. The ineptitude and incompetence of the Johnson government’s response to Coronavirus becomes increasingly obvious. As it becomes embroiled in a political crisis entirely of its own making – Johnson’s refusal to sack Dominic Cummings for a flagrant breach of lockdown rules, giving a dangerous green light to the public to do the same – Starmer has shrewdly held back. Rather than issue shrill calls for resignations and enquiries, as Corbyn would have done, he has watched from a safe distance as a Tory civil war erupts over Johnson’s craven cowardice. Whether Cummings stay or goes, the government looks weaker by the day, as Starmer grows in stature.
Suddenly, Cummings’ contrarianism and wackiness are a liability for Johnson. His fixation with a “long march through the institutions”, disrupting here and creating chaos there, Is precisely what post-Coronavirus Britain doesn’t need. Starmer’s forensic questioning at PMQs – confrontations delayed by Johnson’s own brush with the virus – has swiftly shown Johnson to be a bumbling lightweight, whose nonchalance about care home deaths have been brutally exposed.
After the dam breaks, a flood of analysis and recrimination. More than ten days on from Labour’s catastrophic defeat in the general election, the pain is still raw, and many in the party don’t seem to have realised the enormity of what has happened.
I am writing this as Members of Parliament are gathered in Westminster, on the first Saturday since the Falklands conflict of 1982, for yet another “make or break” day of reckoning on Brexit. MPs have just voted narrowly to pass Oliver Letwin’s amendment, delaying a decision on Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal and compelling him to request an extension of Article 50.
News that the redeveloped London Bridge station 
Brexit, and the ongoing Conservative leadership contest, dominate. Other stories rarely get a hearing. The fact that despite her imminent resignation as Prime Minister, 
Holocaust denial at Labour party meetings. Jewish members being called “dirty Zionists”, or worse. Party staffers being made to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements to stop them speaking out against the lack of action against the culprits. Interventions by Jeremy Corbyn’s office, and the party’s general secretary Jennie Formby, to change the composition of disciplinary panels, apparently to thwart them from expelling those found to have been anti-semitic. The appointment of Thomas Gardiner as head of the party’s disputes unit, who downgraded sanctions against several anti-semites from expulsions to suspension, or from suspensions to warnings. 
Away from the noise of Brexit, Labour – and the British Left in general – is buzzing with new economic ideas more loudly than it has for decades. Moving the privatised utilities to a new form of mutual nationalisation is now Labour policy. So is a new Financial Transaction Tax. Universal Basic Income is entering the political mainstream. 
