When Sir Keir Starmer staked out his general election pledges on Thursday it was the culmination of a Labour strategy drawn up in early 2022. More than two years ago his chief strategist Morgan McSweeney gave a presentation to the shadow cabinet in which he displayed a picture of the Death Star in Star Wars, which gives the empire its strength but is then destroyed. “The economy is the flaw in this massive weapon the Tories seem to have built,” he said.
Target this stronghold of the government and it would set one Conservative voter against another and blow up the Tory administration, McSweeney argued, just as the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Death Stars at the end of Star Wars and Return of the