And he thought that was offering us hope...

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Almost everyone who’s ever worked in an office environment must surely have seen the memo, or some variation on it, purporting to be from the head honcho saying that he has had reports that morale is low and that the hangings and floggings will therefore continue until it improves. Not the funniest of pre-social media memes, but most people will have understood that it was a spoof, albeit one which plays on their own confidence (or lack thereof) in the ability of management to improve the situation. Only the most humourless will have taken it as some sort of instruction manual picked up on a management course.

Every rule, allegedly, has its exception and the exception to this rule appears to be Keir Starmer. Yesterday’s speech was intended, apparently, as part of his efforts to give people hope of a better future. But his Hope Generation Apparatus appears to have been fitted with some sort of inverter mechanism, just like his Shoulder Broadness Assessment Gauge. There are circumstances in which a negative message can, paradoxically, also have a positive effect. Churchill offering only “blood, toil, tears and sweat” is perhaps the most obvious example. But a war which looked and felt to most people like an existential threat just isn’t the same as an imaginary financial black hole in an inherited budget, which needs to be plugged so that the plans laid out by the previous Tory government can be delivered. No amount of inspiring rhetoric is going to close that gap, even if inspiring rhetoric were to be on offer. Which it isn’t.

The only hope that it inspired in me was the hope that he really isn’t planning to continue with the metaphorical hangings and floggings until morale improves. And the hope that that isn’t itself a forlorn hope.