WHO is Frank Hope? Because he sounds like a made-up politician from some starry eyed box set.
In TV fantasyland an aspiring leader can be swept to power with bland platitudes, mulchy soundbites and zero accountability.
EPAFrank Hope, sorry, Sir Keir, offered ‘a partnership with you in pursuit of a new Britain, with foundations built to last’[/caption]
GettyStarmer offered the exact same snake oil he claims his opponents try to palm off on voters, while hammering divisions of his own[/caption]
Frank Hope kisses babies and promises a land of milk and honey.
Frank gives speeches more designed to tug at the heartstrings than make voters fear for their wallets.
Political opponents are reduced to cartoon baddies, only Frank Hope and the good team can save the day through a sickly dose of idealism.
Rivals have “no purpose beyond the fight to save their own skins” and only want to “take Britain down to their level, kick the hope out of us all”.
But Frank Hope’s team, the red team, will “bring the country together, earn trust as well as votes, nurture a spirit of national unity”.
If it sounds too good to be true, that is because it is.
Merely babble
It is pie crust, moralising nonsense that makes disillusioned voters remember why they hate the lot of them.
But for Sir Keir Starmer, Frank Hope is real.
And yesterday he seemed to think this “frank hope” will be enough to propel him into power later this year and free the land from the wicked Tories.
Because where there should have been policies and plans, there was merely babble.
In his New Year speech in Bristol, the Labour boss vowed to rid Britain of the Tories and “crush their politics of divide and decline with a new Project Hope”.
Not “a grandiose utopian hope” apparently. Nor “the hope of the easy answer, the quick fix, or the miracle cure”.
No, apparently Britain is crying out for “a credible hope, A FRANK HOPE, a hope that levels with you about the hard road ahead, but which shows you a way through, a light at the end of the tunnel”.
The problem is Starmer offered the exact same snake oil he claims his opponents try to palm off on voters, while hammering divisions of his own.
Under fire for his much-vaulted pledge to borrow an extra £28billion a year for green stuff, Sir Keir claimed he wouldn’t borrow all the money any more.
Yet there was not a hint of how he would then pay for his grand plans to create a fully employed green economy of wind farm builders.
Instead, Frank Hope, sorry, Sir Keir, offered “a partnership with you in pursuit of a new Britain, with foundations built to last”.
They say you should campaign in poetry and govern in prose, but yesterday Starmer appeared to be campaigning entirely in Nineties power ballad.
“Hold on to the flickering hope in your heart that things can be better, because they can,” he warbled. “You can choose it. You can choose the hope . . . ”
We just have to search for the heroes inside ourselves, it seems.
According to Sir Keir, politics should not be “a sermon from on high, a self-regarding lecture, vanity dressed up as virtue. No, it should be a higher calling”.
Yet it seems he has failed to pass on that message to his legion of speech writers, who yesterday didn’t mention any actual policies that might explain to millions of undecided voters what they would get beyond nice feelings.
Starmer said he offers “the hope of change and renewal, married to the responsibility of service, that’s what I believe in”.
I have read that sentence a dozen times and I still can’t work out what it actually means.
In Frank Hope’s fantasy world politics is reduced to Red v Blue, clever Remainers v unfortunate, silly Leavers, magical thinking v the Evil Tories. Sir Keir Starmer, knight of the people v crooked Rishi rich.
Asked what would change under Labour, the aspiring Prime Minister literally said yesterday: “It will feel different, frankly.”
Apparently, “the character of politics will change, and with it the national mood. A collective breathing out. A burden lifted. And then, the space for a more hopeful look forward”.
A collective shrug and a banging of the head against the brick wall more like, frankly.
The reason TV shows such as The West Wing were so popular was because they gave viewers comfort in what a saccharine version of politics could be, rather than what politics actually is — hard choices and hard graft.
Fictional President Bartlet and his schmaltzy speeches were meant to be an escapism, not a campaign manual.
This isn’t the West Wing, Sir Keir, this is Westminster, and the time to show voters the colour of your money.
Because currently millions of undecided voters only remember the man who spent years trying to overturn the will of 17.5million people while now saying “you’re right to be anti-Westminster, right to be angry about what politics has become”.
They remember the man who argued for endless lockdowns while now arguing for “a politics that treads a little lighter on all of our lives”.
And where Captain Hindsight used to hammer every dividing line he could — from the comfort of not actually having to make any decisions — now he pleads for an end to division. Or to “moderate your political wishes out of respect for the different wishes of others”.
Yesterday we learnt the election is still six months away at least — plenty of time for a change of tune.
A leader truly trying to win back the trust of voters would put away poetry and level with voters about his true plans.
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