Good morning. Who would you trust to put up a shelf? Keir Starmer or Rishi Sunak? This could be the defining question of the election. Find out why below.
Then, Hannah Barnes dissects the Cass report into NHS gender service failings. The report has triggered a shift in Labour. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, has committed to implementing the report in full while suggesting he had been wrong to insist unequivocally that all trans women are women. This shouldn’t be a surprise: last year, the party dropped its pledge to implement self-ID for trans people.
Finally, we have some exclusive polling from Redfield & Wilton on whether Sadiq Khan will retain the London mayoralty. And a note from me on the Russian writer Zamyatin and the threat posed by AI. Sign up here to read it all in full:
Only 13 per cent of people would choose Rishi Sunak over Keir Starmer to put up a shelf, according to a poll from JL Partners. This is one of the most revealing surveys to come out this year.
The question usually asked by this type of poll is who would you rather have a pint with. That was when people wanted their politicians relatable, chummy and amusing. But this is a sober age. The kids don’t drink any more. Putting up a shelf is a better symbol for the task facing our leaders than lobbing banter across the bar. The metric had to change because of Boris Johnson. He was the archetypal who-would-you-have-a-pint-with? prime minister. But he became a drunken bore who presided other alcohol-fuelled chaos. As well as moving away from the national embarrassment that was partygate, erecting a shelf captures the public’s sense that the country is so broken, ugly and unkempt that it needs some DIY. You can’t put up a shelf pissed.
Enter Sunak. The man doesn’t even drink. He was feted as the efficient technocrat who grappled with the problems left by his entertaining, louche but ineffective predecessors. You might not go to the pub with him but he was the steady hand resolving the country’s problems one nail at a time. Inflation? Nailed down. Growth? He’d worked in the private sector for Christ’s sake! He has an MBA! Of course he could rustle up some economic growth.
But this was the problem. That Sunak was the man for the job meant expectations were high. When he failed to deliver, he could not revert to being the guy you’d go to the pub with. He lost at his own game. Which explains why he is feeling so frustrated. There are growing reports of him shouting at his aides. He aimed to put up the shelf, but is slowly realising that he is actually trying to hammer a nail into rock.
The other reason that Sunak has lost the trust of the shelfless electorate is his opposite number. Keir Starmer – whose father was a toolmaker – sells himself as a pragmatic fixer who will save the nation from slapdash “sticking plaster” politics. “Security” – whether from the threat posed by crooked shelves or flatlining pay – has become a lodestar for Labour’s leadership. Starmer has a Peroni after a hard day’s work, not a suitcase of claret. He stops at red lights when he rides a bike. This is reliability. He’s judged the moment well: ten years of national renewal is a sobering task, one that requires dexterity, not flamboyance. Starmer has been rewarded with 47 per cent of people choosing him to do the fixing.
The voters’ calculation is simple. They don’t want their prime minister grinning at them from across the bar. They want someone to just put up the bloody shelf. Sunak had promise. But he has outed himself as a poor tradesman. Why not hand the hammer to Starmer?
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Freddie’s picks
“Even on relatively marginal issues, there are Whitehall stories of a two-page submission asking for a decision being returned by the Prime Minister’s office with a request for a four-page submission, which is then subsequently returned with a request for a ten-page submission with supporting annexes.” David Gauke makes a strong case that Sunak’s problem is his inexperience.
Wolfgang Münchau notes that Europe’s hard right is divided. But does it matter?
Margaret Drabble goes inside the country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann.
Fascinating scoop from Patrick Maguire: Harold Wilson had an affair with his staffer, Janet Hewlett-Davies (Times).
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How do we protect the upsides of flexibility for workers whilst providing security and union representation? What is the right balance between workers’ autonomy and worker protections? Listen here to our exclusive podcast episode, in partnership with Uber, as they approach the three-year anniversary of their recognition agreement with GMB Union, where we discuss the future of work in 21st-century Britain.
The Cass review into children’s gender care should shame us all
Three-and-a-half years after it began, we finally have the findings of Dr Hilary Cass’s review into NHS youth gender identity services. It is a damning indictment of how badly we, as a society, have let down a group of vulnerable and highly distressed children.
“Some practitioners abandoned normal clinical approaches” to the assessment of young people with complex lives, Cass concludes. “They deserve very much better.”
Commissioned by NHS England in 2020, the review’s interim findings led to the closure of the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) last month, and the ending of the routine prescribing of puberty blockers to children with gender-related distress. For those who have closely observed the care provided to this group of youngsters, there are few surprises in the report. But it is devastating to see it all laid out in one place.
“This is an area of remarkably weak evidence,” Cass writes, “and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint.” The reality, she says, is that there is “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
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