Two weeks before an election that is expected to catapult him into 10 Downing Street, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Keir Starmer, is tiptoeing on the campaign trail, the latest practitioner of the “Ming vase strategy.”The phrase, which refers to a politician gingerly avoiding slips to protect a lead in the polls, is credited to Roy Jenkins, a more freewheeling British politician, who likened a previous Labour candidate, Tony Blair, on the eve of his 1997 landslide, to a man “carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor.”In truth, Mr. Starmer has been carrying the vase for a lot longer than this six-week campaign. He has nursed his party’s double-digit polling lead for more than 18 months, methodically repositioning Labour as a credible center-left alternative to the divided, erratic, sometimes extremist Conservatives. It’s the culmination of an extraordinary four-year project, in which Mr. Starmer, 61, purged his left-wing predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, and his loyalists; went after the anti-Semitism that had contaminated the party’s ranks; and pulled its economic and national security policies closer to the center.

Source: The Times June 22, 2024 01:35 UTC