Daily Mail Desperation

It is hard not to admire the sheer acrobatic desperation of the Daily Mail. Only they could look at Keir Starmer, the man who has delivered the most right-wing Labour government since Ramsay MacDonald, and decide he is a sleeper cell for international communism. According to the Mail, the KGB must have had astonishing foresight. They allegedly groomed a young law student in the mid 80s, then patiently waited forty years for him to become Prime Minister and promptly govern like a moderately anxious accountant terrified of spooking the bond markets.

You would think Moscow might feel short-changed. After all, if this is the outcome of decades of deep cover, someone at Lubyanka needs a performance review.

The game is obvious. Farage is under pressure for racist behaviour at school, then racist behaviour as an adult, then racist behaviour as a political strategy. So the Mail needs a diversion from their hero. Ideally one involving red ink, Cyrillic typefaces, and a grainy photograph of a young Starmer wearing a rucksack. In their telling, a forgotten student pamphlet becomes a Marxist front. A cheap work camp trip becomes a StB operation. A few earnest essays about Thatcher morph into a Kremlin plot. It is political taxidermy. Stuff the narrative first, then add the glass eyes.

Meanwhile, the Farage story is treated with the delicacy of a priceless vase. Dozens of former classmates describing antisemitic taunts? Mere gossip. The party he leads accepting money from men linked to Putin? A regrettable misunderstanding. The steady use of racism as a political tool? Only speaking plainly. And this from a paper that once cheered Hitler on and told us to look kindly on the Blackshirts. The moral authority here is somewhat less than overwhelming.

The real reason for the Mail’s panic is simple. Starmer is not the socialist bogeyman they need him to be. He is a small c conservative in all but rosette, governing within fiscal rules the Tories themselves shredded, terrified of being portrayed as soft on anything. There is nothing remotely Bolshevik about him. If the revolution is coming, it forgot to tell the Treasury.

Farage, on the other hand, is precisely what they dare not confront. A man who thrives on racial tension. A man whose party is knee-deep in dubious funding. A man who flirts openly with authoritarian strongmen while claiming to represent the common man. A man who thinks shouting into cameras is a political programme. But he is their creature. He punches the right targets. He serves the right interests. So the Mail must loop the tape back and pretend the real danger is a former DPP who spent years putting terrorists in prison, not man who gets his support from the tax dodgers and hedge fund managers.

This is why the piece is so hysterical. They are trying to turn an accountant into Trotsky and a demagogue into a misunderstood schoolboy. It is theatre for voters who need a pantomime villain because the real one keeps appearing on GB News grinning like a man who has just stepped off a yacht paid for by someone with a very thick accent and very deep pockets.

The country is drifting. Public services are shot. Growth is flat. The far right is being nudged into the mainstream. And the Mail thinks the real emergency is a student magazine from 1986.

It is a distraction, and a shabby one. The danger to Britain is not that Starmer once wrote about common ownership at university. It is that Farage still peddles racism for profit, still surrounds himself with shady money, and still enjoys newspapers willing to twist themselves into knots to protect him.

If the Mail wishes to warn us about foreign influence, perhaps it should start with the party that keeps taking donations from friends of the Kremlin. Not the Prime Minister who is about as revolutionary as a lukewarm cup of tea.