Stonewall Starmer goes full 'Sierra'

Not as much fun as you thought?

Having long suggested that Team Starmer fully intends to tough it out – and they had plenty of advanced notice and planning time [1] for this crisis, at least – that’s how it still seems, & strongly so, at the time of writing.  There’s only one oven-ready candidate in the wings, with no “anyone but [Wes]” votes against him: our old pick Ed Miliband.  

Team S is pursuing what I call the Sierra Strategy when I’m strategising in business.  Recall the Ford jallopy of that name?  Having had many years of consummate success with its predecessor, the smart rust-bucket Cortina line[2], Marks 1-4, Ford went for a fairly ‘bold’ new look.  The ‘jelly-mould’ hatchback found immediate disfavour, and despite the usual launch promotions sales were not good.

Ford had a massive call to make:  re-skin and rebrand it fairly promptly with as much commercial dignity as possible, or double down.  They doubled down with massive corporate determination.  Advertising, deep discounts, promotions of all kinds, a smarter Ghia variant that was half-decent – everything in the marketing man’s book of tricks.  For several years!  Dunno what this campaign cost, or how the counterfactual might have played out: but in terms of sheer brute force to get the Sierra into the top 3 or 4 UK best-sellers, they succeeded.  And that’s Starmer now.

PS, Miliband is sitting there trying to figure his optimum positioning for picking up the crown when it falls.  And a coronation is what he wants: no knife-job.  My guess?  At the critical moment, he offers Starmer Foreign Secretary and a big Euro-push mandate.  Kier, we can both make history together …     

PPS  If you think Starmer is stonewalling impressively, just watch Trump between now and the mid-terms.  He’ll be looking at everything from conjuring a genuine crisis in order to call them off, to calling the results void – and calling out the National Guard in every state that returns a Dem.    

ND  

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[1]  E.g. the timing of the King’s Speech

[2]  The Mk 1 started life as just the plain ‘Consul’.  Didn’t play ideally, so they changed it to ‘Consul Cortina’ (as opposed to its predecessor the ‘Consul Classic’.  See, these Ford guys were always sharp with marketing-based solutions.