DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Is the tide turning for Rishi and the Tories?

DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Is the tide turning for Rishi and the Tories?

When Rishi Sunak awoke on Thursday last week, he may have felt like pulling the bedsheets despairingly back over his head.

In front of him lay the grim prospect of three Tory by-election drubbings, confirming Sir Keir Starmer’s inexorable march towards Downing Street.

But a week is a long time in politics. Today, if not quite bouncing like Tigger, the Prime Minister will surely be feeling more chipper. For he’s had a decent few days.

The unlikely victory in Uxbridge, attributed to hatred of Labour’s Ulez car tax, was a huge confidence boost.

And while the Selby and Somerton defeats were harrowing, the crucial factor was a dramatic collapse in the Tory vote – not a surge in support for rival parties.

When Rishi Sunak awoke on Thursday last week, he may have felt like pulling the bedsheets despairingly back over his head

The lesson is that, despite a chaotic past 12 months, there is no outpouring of public enthusiasm for Sir Keir’s leadership.

To capitalise, Mr Sunak must – as this paper has argued repeatedly – align himself with the concerns of ordinary people, not the virtue-signalling obsessions and orthodoxies of the woke elite.

His impressively robust response to the Mail’s exposé of corrupt immigration lawyers (a story so significant even the BBC eventually felt obliged to cover it) was a textbook example.

A tweet accusing Labour of siding with the criminal trafficking gangs may have infuriated the liberal Left, but the public – which wants Channel crossings to be stopped – has clocked that Sir Keir fights all measures to tackle illegal immigration.

Equally, Mr Sunak has condemned major banks for closing people’s accounts on the grounds of political wrong-think. It is, he says, a grotesque attack on free speech.

Labour, on the other hand, seems perfectly content with this practice, which the public rightly finds sinister, as long as it is used to destroy its ideological enemies.

By taking a more common-sense and ruthless approach to other issues – trans militancy, net zero – the Prime Minister can win back voters and unsettle Starmer.

Yes, the Tories remain adrift in the polls. But by getting on the front foot this week they have been offered a tantalising glimpse of the path to a political reawakening.

Spineless Starmer

Sir Keir Starmer loves to lecture sanctimoniously on the virtue of political courage.

So why won’t Labour’s leader show some backbone and tell us where he stands on Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ulez expansion to London’s outer suburbs. Does he agree with it – or want it scrapped?

Sir Keir Starmer (pictured) loves to lecture sanctimoniously on the virtue of political courage

His own frontbenchers are adamant that a cost of living squeeze is the worst time to clobber families who can’t afford newer, less polluting vehicles with the punishing £12.50-a-day charge.

But Sir Keir whimpers that it’s not a ‘simple political decision’.

What a pathetic cop-out. The truth is, he is an environmental zealot. And given that Labour has banked £1.5million from Just Stop Oil backer Dale Vince, he’s hardly going to bite the hand that feeds it.

Trans clarity needed

Teachers have enough on their plates with their day jobs of educating children.

These days, however, schools are increasingly having to grapple with the thorny issue of what to do if a pupil announces they are transgender.

There are huge legal, safeguarding and medical ramifications. That is why it so disappointing and farcical that the Government will not publish official guidance until at least the autumn.

Until then, schools must continue making policy on the hoof, potentially to the detriment of children’s health.

Parents should at least be told if their child announces they’re trans. It would be inconceivable for the Tories – the party of the family – to keep them in the dark.

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