'Hitting rock bottom' - How Labour's belief that things can only get better from here misses the idea that they could actually stay the same
While some of the criticisms in Rosie Duffield’s resignation letter to Keir Starmer were valid, its lasting impact was undermined by the fact that it came from someone perceived as fundamentally dishonest, arrogant, and insincere - likely more upset about being passed over for promotion than focused on genuine concerns.
It was a self-serving resignation, ultimately.
Duffield, despite campaigning on Labour's ‘Change’ platform that allowed her to comfortably retain her seat at the general election, does not, as of today, intend to hold a by-election in her Canterbury constituency to determine if hers was a party or personal vote three months ago.
Instead, she remains as an independent MP bemoaning the Labour Party over questionable donations (of which Duffield herself has been in receipt of), and policy like the winter fuel allowance and the two-child benefit cap (that Duffield felt so strongly about that she abstained on both).
Duffield went on to criticise the sleaze, nepotism and “apparent avarice” that is “off the scale” alongside “increasingly outrageous” revelations of “hypocrisy.”
It’s all very noisy, but the reality for Labour is that Duffield is mostly inconsequential in all of this.
If she is remembered at all, the political obituary for Duffield will be small and contain nothing really of worth beyond how the first female Labour MP for Canterbury held questionable views on trans rights and flouted coronavirus restrictions in April 2020, which resulted in her shadow frontbench resignation.
By the end of the week, few likely even remembered her individual resignation let alone some of the “fair” criticisms contained within. Duffield could change this in the future, of course. She suggests that Labour is her ‘political home’ yet her penchant for attention-seeking, controversy - and selective ambivalence to sleaze and hypocrisy - may find suitable refuge in the considerably sleazier and far more avaricious Reform.
Who knows what future awaits Duffield. Who cares?
For the media, however, for that brief period on Saturday evening going into Sunday, it was more fish guts being chucked in the water. They loved it.
Critics of the current Starmer administration - a weird, nihilistic coalition of right and left voices that ironically converge in the centre ground - loved it, too; theirs is the belief that in the future more will follow suit.
Will they? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s the noise that matters the most, however.