The anti-Trump attack line that could stop Farage – but Starmer is too timid to say

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here. As an old American political joke goes, if you see two men punching each other in the street, one shouting “traitor” and the other “liar”, you know you are in the presence of people trying to unite the Democratic Party. Much the same could be said of the Labour Party, with its history of fratricidal conflict between its right and left wings, strife that intensified in 2015 and 2016 with Jeremy Corbyn elected as Labour leader and divisions over the Brexit referendum. After his general election victory in 2024, Sir Keir Starmer ran the party very much from the right, provoking a mass defection of Labour voters to the Greens, but without denting the Reform vote. “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” said Dr Samuel Johnson, a saying appropriate to Labour after its calamitous performance in the local and devolved elections on 7 May. As Labour MPs saw the electoral noose tightening around their necks, the obstacles blocking the return of the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, to the House of Commons – so huge and insurmountable a few days earlier – magically evaporated. The prospect of political extinction is proving a great energiser, as several Labour leaders on the right and left of the party clear Burnham’s way to succeed Starmer and lead a successful counter-attack against Nigel Farage and Reform. Standing in a by-election in Makerfield, where Reform swept the board in the local elections, is probably less risky than it looks for Burnham, given that the horde of journalists who have descended on the constituency appear to be having difficulty finding anybody who said they might vote against Burnham. The by-election provides him with an ideal opportunity to show that he can win where Starmer lost. There is enough at stake to guarantee maximum media and public interest in what is billed as gladiatorial combat between Labour’s new champion and Reform. The by-election will be the test as to whether Labour can hope to reverse the right-wing rip tide sweeping Britain towards its own version of Trumpism. Removing Starmer, with his genius for self-sabotage, may help his successor, bearing in mind that a canny political operator like Farage fought the local election under the slogan “Vote Reform. Get Starmer Out”. Reform – like other populist parties – portrays itself as a party “on our side” and not part of a remote elite. Burnham can credibly play the same dubious card, taking advantage of his self-exile from Westminster. A poll by YouGov on behalf of the Persuasion UK shows that in the local elections the largest defection by 2024 Labour voters was to the Greens and Lib Dems, but some 57 per cent of these say they would return if Labour had a more progressive agenda. Only 11 per cent of those who defected to Reform and the Conservatives were willing to go back. With typical cack-handedness, Starmer has veered ineffectually right and left, attacking Reform one day and the Greens the next. Only a Labour government that can credibly present itself as the best vehicle to stop Reform will re-attract defectors from the other two parties. Analysis by Persuasion UK a year ago showed that the two attack lines against Reform most likely to resonate with their potential voters are the party’s closeness to Trump and its billionaire donors, undercutting its patriotic and anti-elite credentials. Farage’s edginess when explaining why he accepted a £5m gift from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne indicates his sense of vulnerability on this issue. But the biggest political failure by Starmer in combating Reform over the last two years has been to avoid pillorying it as the UK proxy of President Donald Trump. The accusation is perfectly fair as the British right – both Reform and the Conservatives – have surprisingly few ideas about the future of the UK that did not originate with the American extreme right. For parties that beat the jingo drum so vigorously, this retread of Trumpian policies and prejudices should make them an easy target, especially after the debacle of Trump’s war on Iran. Yet this has been a card that Starmer has never played effectively, even while timidly distancing Britain from the Iran war. Yet as poor quality a politician and national leader as Starmer may be, his failings replicate those of the British and European elites. Praised though he is even by critics for his leadership in foreign affairs, all he has done is to plug the UK into a collective European leadership whose dithering has left it with astonishingly little influence in the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Likewise, if Starmer has led the Labour Party towards defeat and extinction, his defenders could justly say that equivalent social democratic parties in France, Italy and Germany have done no better – and often worse. As with other populist nativist movements vying for power, Reform presents itself as the saviour of a broken nation, a claim echoed by the media in the last few days as they wonder if Britain has become “ungovernable”, humiliated by the prospect of having six prime ministers in 10 years. The reality is rather that Britain may not be governed very well, but the idea that it is collapsing into anarchy is infantile. The exaggeration lets off the hook those responsible for disasters like HS2 and PPE procurement during the Covid-19 pandemic, while not asking why HS1 and the Covid-19 vaccination development and roll out were so successful. As for the swift succession of prime ministers – the turnover of which is likely soon to exceed that of Henry VIII’s wives – this may produce turmoil, but it does not produce disaster. It might even be seen as an encouraging sign that Britain is an animate democracy, given that multiple leaders are far better than a single irremovable one, such as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, who keeps his grip on power for years on end, regardless of success or failure. Pious finger-wagging at the media for over-focusing on the personalities and plots is a common criticism in British political crises. But in the struggle for the Labour leadership, concentration on personal qualities is not out of place. In the last two decades, politics everywhere have become “presidentialised” with political leaders becoming their own “communicators-in-chief”. This was true of Silvio Berlusconi, three times Italian prime minister, and of Boris Johnson. Trump and Farage have created personality cults, both men supremely expert at dominating the political agenda. Self-destructively, Labour selected two leaders in Corbyn and Starmer who had little in common but were both notoriously inarticulate and ill at ease with the media. Even when fighting for his political life this week, Starmer sounded dull and inauthentic. In the age of the permanent press conference, any new Labour leader has to do better than that. Fear of a common enemy is a powerful force in imposing unity and a sense of direction on a fragmented Labour Party, but it must stay frightened if it is to preserve Britain from a Trumpian future. Further thoughts Will America and Israel go back to war with Iran? Do they stand any better chance of winning a decisive military victory now than they did earlier in the year? What chance is there of a negotiated end to the conflict? When will the Strait of Hormuz reopen for commercial shipping? Key questions like these preoccupy governments internationally, amid frightening evidence that Trump and his administration live in a fantasy world constructed out of wishful thinking about Iranian weakness and American strength. Factual evidence to the contrary is denounced as false, as the White House and Pentagon dig in on their propaganda claim – and show clear signs of believing it themselves – about Iran’s shattered war-fighting capacity. Their self-deception is so gross that it might lure them into launching a doomed second phase to the war, ignoring what US intelligence agencies are privately telling policymakers in Washington. A classified intelligence assessment from early May published by The New York Times says that Iran has regained operational access to 30 of its 33 missile launching sites, which threaten US navy and commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. During the 38-day war, the US adopted the tactic of sealing off these facilities by air strikes because of the near impossibility of destroying bunkers deep underground. “Iran still fields about 70 per cent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 per cent of its pre-war missile stockpile, according to the assessments,” reports the paper. Intact Iranian missile arsenals contain both long-range ballistic and shorter-range cruise missiles, while away from the Gulf, Iran has regained access nationwide to 90 per cent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities, according to the intelligence assessment. Yet the White House and Pentagon pretend that the US and Israel won a great victory in the war which the President launched on 28 February and paused on 8 April. Asked about the negative intelligence assessments, a White House spokeswoman, Olivia Wales, said that anyone who “thinks Iran has reconstituted its military is either delusional or a mouthpiece” for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump himself posted that it was “virtual treason” to suggest that Iran’s military had not been crushed. Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez is quoted as doubling down on this nonsense, saying “it is so disgraceful that The New York Times and others are acting as public relations agents for the Iranian regime in order to paint Operation Epic Fury as anything other than a historic accomplishment”. What I find frightening about this is that I have spent a large part of my journalistic career reporting on disastrous wars foolishly launched by over-optimistic national leaders who convinced themselves that their enemies would be a pushover. Saddam Hussein – who was no fool but mistakenly believed he had semi-divine powers of judgement – did it twice, calamitously invading Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. President George W Bush, led on by hubris and poor advice, attacked Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 and became mired in unwinnable wars in both countries. Puffed up by arrogant self-belief and misadvised by a close circle of security chiefs, President Vladimir Putin sent his ill-prepared army into Ukraine in 2022 in the conviction that they could seize the country in a few days. Four years and one million dead and wounded Russians later, the “special military operation” is still stalled. All these leaders were able and intelligent people with access to good intelligence, yet they plunged headlong into conflicts they were unlikely to win. Trump is probably more isolated from reality than any of these failed warlords, which makes it frighteningly likely that he will find no way out of this war – and may escalate it, either on purpose or by accident. Beneath the radar Just as the EU is to make a €90bn (£78bn) loan to Ukraine to support its civil and military spending in 2026-27, an all-embracing corruption scandal in Ukraine has deepened and become more politically explosive. Ominously, the scandal is getting closer and closer to President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose former all-powerful right-hand man and chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, was charged in a court in Kyiv on Monday with corruption and money-laundering. In a statement, Ukraine’s National Anti-corruption Bureau (Nabu) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s office described Yermak, sacked by Zelensky last November, as “a member of an organised crime group” involved in laundering funds through a luxury housing project outside Kyiv. The move against Yermak follows the leaking of incriminating tapes of telephone calls and conversations between senior Ukrainian officials discussing kickbacks in an apartment in Kyiv bugged by Nabu for over a year. This was part of a wider investigation by the anti-corruption agencies into a scheme to steal $100m (£75m) from Ukraine’s energy and nuclear sectors. Another casualty of the investigation is Timur Mindich, formerly co-owner of Zelensky’s film production company, who was charged with money laundering, but has now moved to Israel. Before the scandal finally broke, the president’s office had made a determined but ultimately abortive effort last July to bring the anti-corruption agencies under its control. This failed after widespread demonstrations against it. The rolling revelations about elite corruption is obviously damaging to Zelensky during a war in which so many Ukrainians have been killed or wounded. An important feature of the investigation is that Nabu works with the FBI, which occupies a whole floor in the bureau’s headquarters, according to a source. Zelensky has now been stripped of much of his inner circle, raising the question of whether or not the White House wants to get rid of him, opening the door to an American-brokered peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. Trump is particularly eager for this to happen in order to restore his reputation as a peacemaker, credentials in dire need of repair after the debacle of his war against Iran. Cockburn’s picks David Aaronovitch, whose writings have become more interesting since he left The Times, has written a compelling Substack about how the right – both Reform and Tories – have become openly Islamophobic in the last few years.