No doubt Sun Tzu, or Bismarck, or another of those sword-belted thinkers so beloved of our political wonks, has said something along these lines: anybody can defend, but only a general who truly understands his forces, and the enemy’s, can successfully attack.
So with the first real signs of buyers’ remorse among Boris Johnson’s voters, and even his own MPs, Labour’s spads and spinners need to get the maths right at last. They have long failed in this prime directive because they are in thrall to the very thing they are supposed to see through: myth. Faced with a Conservative Party that has reinvented itself since 2015 by finally embracing its manifest destiny, the historic UK Anti-Tory League – “Labour” being merely its current name – needs likewise to comprehend its own nature, and fast. The two past leaders to who it should be studying are perhaps unexpected: Neil Kinnock and Winston Churchill.
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