Politics: hope dies last

By Richard North - May 11, 2026

The onrush of news, comment and speculation on Labour’s leadership crisis has reached such a level in the British legacy media where it must surely be about to peak – although the soap opera is far from over.

Whether or not, it certainly has reached peak tedium, distracting from the pressing problems that assail us – none of which are going to be improved by a change of prime minister, or even a change of government.

Today, though, Starmer will be trying to rescue his premiership with a speech in what amounts to yet another “reset” to join the four others which he has launched over the past two years.

Yet this can hardly address what the Telegraph asserts is the central flaw of his administration, that he “had no strategy for government, no plan to deliver on his promises to the electorate”.

For almost two years, the paper says, Britain has had a void where a leader should have been, at a time when all of the country’s pathologies – pitiful growth, squeezed living standards, fraying social cohesion, a culture of entitlement – have got worse, not better.

Looking at a preview of the speech, leaked by Politics UK, scepticism would seem to be fully justified as Stamer is to tell us that, “To meet the challenges that our country faces, incremental change won’t cut it”.

From that, one might assume that Starmer is in “slash and burn” mode as he picks four heads: “growth, defence, Europe, energy”, arguing that “we need a bigger response than we anticipated in 2024 because these are not ordinary times”.

Then come the vacuous slogans – the quintessential part of any Starmer speech – as we are treated to a hitherto undeclared core Labour argument: “Strength through fairness”. It’s a bit close to Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy), although there’s not much “joy” in the Labour camp at the moment.

Perhaps that will all change in the King’s Speech when, we are told, “you will see those values writ large, and you will see hope, urgency and exactly whose side we are on”. However, that might lose something in the telling as we already know whose side Starmer is on, and it ain’t ours.

The one thing we can rely on with Starmer, though, is that he never leaves a cliché unturned in the pursuit of something to say, “People need hope”, he will tell us, with the comforting thought (not) that “We will face up to the big challenges, and we will make the big arguments”.

Yet those “big arguments”, it seems, are that: “the Labour case that only Labour values and Labour policies can ensure our country not only weathers these storms but emerges stronger and fairer”.

What this all boils down to though is scarcely credible. Starmer has chosen his hill to die on: “This Labour Government will be defined by rebuilding our relationship and by putting Britain at the heart of Europe, so that we are stronger on the economy, on trade, on defence, you name it”, he will tell us.

And, from this will come the conclusion: “Because standing shoulder to shoulder with the countries that most share our interests, our values, and our enemies – that is the right choice for Britain. That is the Labour choice”.

You could hardly credit that this was the man whose party has just suffered a resounding defeat at the hands of Reform – a party which is closely associated with maximising the distance between Britain and “Europe”.

If this is all he has to offer – and his advisors haven’t been able to convince him to re-write the speech before it is delivered – then we might as well buy in to the leadership schtick, as mere mortals can only tolerate so much before projectile vomiting takes over.

Our very serious problem though is that even if Starmer does go, what is likely to replace him will almost certainly be a whole lot worse. This may be hard to take in, but for the “iron rule” of contemporary politics: “just when you think it has got as bad as it can get … it gets worse.

Here, we look at the one cliché from Starmer that has any resonance: “People need hope” and since we’re into German proverbs, we might recall Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt, referring to the persistence of hope until the very end of a struggle.

But, as Pete writes, there is very little to be hopeful about. It is not only that Labour is so uniquely awful but that the alternatives are not much better.

Although political analysis from the Guardian is invariably dire, it does have a point about Badenough and her ersatz Tories. It wasn’t only Labour that lost heavily last Thursday – the Tories lost over 500 seats.

It was also hard to ignore the damage in Badenough’s own back yard of Essex, the paper says, where she and five other shadow cabinet ministers are MPs. Reform ended the party’s 25-year reign at the local authority, as well as taking the Tory-held Newcastle-under-Lyme and Suffolk, as well as making inroads in East and West Sussex.

On that basis, it is hard to see the germ of any real Conservative revival, which means there is no obvious antidote to the onwards march of Farage’s shock troops. Short of effective sabotage by Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party, Reform begins to look like the default option for the 2029 general election, simply because there is no other credible alternative to the “uniparty”.

That leaves us with much the same scenario that has caused so much grief for Starmer. For, if he had “no strategy for government, no plan to deliver on his promises to the electorate”, it is less than likely that Farage will be any different.

Already, the cracks are showing as there are sharp differences over key policy issues. To keep up any façade of unity, all Farage can do is maintain his tabula rasa stance. A definitive plan would probably wreck his party.

If the German proverb is right and “hope dies last”, we should hold on to the idea that, at the eleventh hour, Reform comes up with some workable policies. But the trouble is, policy development doesn’t work that way. It is a long, meticulous process that allows for no short-cuts.

For sure, therefore, people need hope, but hope is dead. All we have is fantasy politics where speculation over party leadership trumps policy and where “insurgent” parties such as Reform live on a wing and a prayer, offering false hope that will never deliver real solutions.