The Labour Party was once like a majestic Whale powering through the oceans of politics. Occasionally it ate the wrong food and got sick and occasionally it was harpooned by either its political opponents or by internal fighting. However despite these challenges the party survived.

But the Labour Party today reminds me very much like a dead whale floating bloated and rotting on the surface of British politics. It is a dead shell of the party that it once was.

Labour has been killed by a great number of things. It’s been killed by a combination of the public’s disgust at the damage done by the policies of the Blair and Brown years, most notably excessive immigration, the rudderless debacle of the Ed Milliband years and the party’s embrace of religious and political extremism during the years of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.

Many people thought that Labour might be able to recover from its hurts by the election of a new leader, a moderate in the form of Sir Keir Starmer, but this does not seem to have happened. Sir Keir has turned out to not be the common sense saviour of the Labour Party that the party needed, but is instead just yet another out of touch metro-leftist. Anyone who saw Sir Keir on national television failing to speak truth about human biology by refusing to say that only women have a cervix, saw a leader who is still in thrall to his party’s extremists.

Britain’s political system demands that there are two roughly equally matched parties in the House of Commons. Each party, both the governing one and the official opposition one need to be credible as either a government or potential government. If there is the case that one party is seen as competent and effective and the official opposition is seen as a bit of a mess, then we have not a democracy but an elective dictatorship.

Dominic Cummings appears to be convinced that Sir Keir Starmer is not an effective leader and I will agree with him on that. Sir Keir is I’m afraid a ‘dud’ and as Mr Cummings says needs to be replaced.

Mr Cummings said:

Accept Starmer is a dud and replace him now.

You could try to force him to change his team and this may improve things a little but even the best case is a very small improvement. A dud’s a dud and changing the team would be displacement activity. The problem isn’t the staff, the problem is him.

Don’t fool yourselves, just bin him now.

Don’t be fooled by ‘maybe the PM’s shitshow on supply chains will move the polls and avoid the need for hard choices’. The PM killed over 100,000 people, his incompetence is not controversial, he can’t help act like a clown while people are dying like flies around him — yet voters still prefer him to your dud. Yes the polls could easily move a bit but you need them to move a lot and stay there — you need to be 40+ with Boris <35 and well ahead on ‘who has the best leader’. Even Miliband and Corbyn sort of managed this briefly and they didn’t have a PM who incompetently killed thousands and inflicted mass suffering then blatantly lied about it all.

Face reality and don’t fool yourselves.

I’m afraid that Mr Cummings is correct. A Labour leader faced with a Tory PM who is seen, in Mr Cummings words by the public as ‘a cross between a clown and a crook’, should be doing better. The fact that Sir Keir’s Labour Party is not doing better does not say anything positive about Boris Johnson and his government but a great deal that is negative about Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

Mr Cummings added:

The PM is seen as somewhere between a clown and a crook by most of the country. He is neither popular, in the sense Blair was in 1997, nor respected, in the way Thatcher was. He has botched covid, recovery from covid, and much else. He can’t get through a week without embarrassing blunders. He’s self-evidently not a serious person and doesn’t even try to be. And people think Starmer would be worse!

With such an appalling record as the Johnson administration has I would have expected Labour to be doing better. We should have expected the official opposition to hold the Johnson government to account over its handling of Covid but instead the Labour leadership just nodded along to whatever the Tories suggested. We should have seen Labour ask awkward questions of the government but they did not. This in my view is dangerous because if awkward questions cannot be asked in Parliament about serious national challenges by the leader of the opposition then it just encourages disgust at both parties and a rise in extra parliamentary activity, sometimes of an extremist nature as we have seen with some of the increasingly aggressive anti vax groups.

The job of the leader of the opposition is to be a shadow government, a credible alternative to Her Majesty’s Government and to show the electorate that they could fulfil the role of government. Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party cannot do this.

I agree with Mr Cummings that Sir Keir Starmer needs to go. However where I disagree is with his suggestion as to who should replace him. Whilst I agree with Mr Cummings that Boris Johnson has a habit of not taking women seriously and as Mr Cummings said ‘just staring at their tits’, I can’t agree with his suggestion that Lisa Nandy would make a good replacement Labour leader. Whilst there is much to be gained in electing a female leader and thereby putting Boris Johnson off guard, I don’t see Lisa Nandy as being able to fulfil that role.

Lisa Nandy, even though she may have many other admirable qualities, is still a bit of a metro-leftist. I can’t see Britain’s working classes flocking back to a Labour Party led by Ms Nandy as she doesn’t give the impression that she is either for the working class or from the working class. Ms Nandy is still tainted by her association with metro left obsessions such as the Cult of Trans and although she has walked back on some of her enthusiasm for this, her previous championing of self ID and for self declared trans prisoners to be incarcerated in women’s prisons, will I believe come back to haunt her.

Whilst it’s quite possible that a female Labour leader would be one of the few with the metaphorical balls to discombobulate Boris Johnson, I can’t see who that could be. The talent pool of female Labour MP’s especially on the Front Bench is pretty shallow. Angela Rayner would be the obvious choice for replacement leader but I doubt that she’s got that much support in either the party or among the general public as a whole. She’s also tainted by association with metro left obsessions including the Cult of Trans.

Maybe the issue of sex needs to be put aside, even though it’s a good weapon to use against Johnson and the best person for the job no matter whether they are male of female needs to be Labour leader. But who could this be? Is there anyone in the Parliamentary Labour party who is not tainted by the very off putting metro Left or association with open borders or eco extremism or any one of a vast number of Labour policies that have ensured that they have been excluded from government for so long? Labour needs a better leader but the frightening thing is that it might just be the case that the leader that Labour needs has not even been elected as an MP yet.