Letter from Australia: England's brutal Ashes lessons

I have just returned from Australia, where, as well as visiting friends in Melbourne, I had the good fortune to watch three days of the third Ashes Test at the Adelaide Oval, in one of the most elegant cities in the world. By the time I arrived in the so-called city of churches, the inquest into what had gone wrong for English cricket was under way.

The series was not yet lost but the goodwill that had accompanied England on their departure in November had been squandered. The mood among the travelling cricket fans I spoke to, before England finally won a dead rubber in a farcical two-day match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, was reminiscent of the mood among Labour MPs at Westminster before Christmas — a mix of dark humour and defeatism.

“Bazball”, the style of aggressive, freewheeling cricket championed by Brendon “Baz” McCullum, England’s Kiwi coach, and their captain, Ben Stokes, had failed when it mattered most, in an Ashes series in Australia. We were told Bazball had liberated the English players, freed them to play without inhibition or fear of failure, even in the toughest of arenas. By the midpoint of the second Test in Brisbane, England were no longer playing Bazball. They were playing merely to avoid complete humiliation. If they ever had a strategic plan, it had been abandoned.

Defeat in sport reveals not only technical failure but character. “Australia is no place for weak men,” Stokes said after his side lost the second Test, sounding more like an exhausted renegade cowboy in a Cormac McCarthy novel. After a two-day defeat in the first Test in Perth he had admitted feeling shellshocked. “Dopey, dopey, dopey,” was the verdict of Ricky Ponting, a former Australia captain, after England’s wicketkeeper-batsman Jamie Smith was caught slogging in the deep just as he had seemed well set in the second innings in Adelaide.

There is no shame in losing cricket matches in Australia. What was unforgivable was the carelessness of England’s approach at the start of the tour, characterised by poor executive planning, inadequate preparation and a kind of stubborn arrogance. There are parallels with Starmer’s Labour, which had a strategy to win an election but not to govern the country. Simply by not being the Tories, Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, believed they would bring economic and political stability. They touted their competence and moral superiority but were deluded. Now they are locked in an attritional struggle for political survival, with senior colleagues openly scheming against them.

Even before the start of the Ashes series, Australians were contemptuous of the ethos of Bazball. They were particularly scornful of the way England had approached the tour, preferring to play one meaningless warm-up game among their own squad rather than matches against battle-hardened state sides as Andrew Strauss’s squad did in the build-up to the triumphant 2010-11 tour, the last time England won a series in Australia.

When England lost the Ashes after only 11 days of cricket, the gum-chewing McCullum finally showed some contrition, conceding that England had been underprepared. The subtext was that they did not realise just how difficult it would be to win cricket matches in Australia.

Australian cricket teams are never poorly prepared: they are serious-minded, resilient, determined to win. They are also realists: they do not impose a preconceived style on a match but adapt to the logic of the situation just as the Australian people have adapted over long, hard decades to the unforgiving landscape in which they have built their remarkable country.

I was struck once again, as I listened to McCullum and later to Rob Key, managing director of England men’s cricket, who was even more contrite, by the parallels between the Ashes debacle and the struggles of the Labour government, which ended the year with the parliamentary party in open revolt against the prime minister.

Starmer and Reeves are not natural political Bazballers. They have a kind of anti-charisma, their style stiff and technocratic. They are serious people, yet in government, after a string of humiliating policy U-turns, they have proved not to be serious enough. Worse still, they no longer seem to know what Labour stands for or how they want to use power: first they lacked a vision and now they lack authority.

What Reeves and Starmer most strikingly share with the Bazballers is a lack of fastidiousness: inadequate preparation and a fatal underestimation of the scale of the task before them. The belated U-turn on proposed inheritance tax changes for farmers, or the “farm tax” — the planning for which led to real misery among owners of small family farms — is merely the latest example of Labour’s carelessness in its overall approach to governing.

At the beginning of the year Sir James Dyson, the billionaire entrepreneur and inventor who owns 36,000 acres of farmland in England, accused Reeves of “vindictiveness” over the Treasury plan to levy inheritance tax on family farms worth more than £1 million. Dyson is exactly the kind of wealthy landowner the tax change was intended to ensnare.

On Boxing Day, he guest-edited BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and used the platform to mount a spirited defence of family farms and family businesses. Success cannot be achieved without first preparing for failure, he said. “Nothing will be easy. You need incredible determination and incredible stamina … in order to achieve what you want to achieve. There’s nothing wrong with failure. Sometimes you will fail. But you simply have to overcome the failure and battle on.”

No consolation victory in the crazy fourth Test in Melbourne can disguise the reality that the Bazballers failed in Australia, but they may yet learn from their mistakes. By contrast the Starmer government is manifestly failing.

Is Britain a serious country? Time and again — on welfare reform, the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, ID cards and the two-child benefits cap — Starmer and Reeves have failed to think through their policies or articulate what they are meant to achieve. They have lacked the resolve to defend a position and explain how it relates to an overarching political purpose. The result is drift and dysfunction, which I am told Starmer is determined to reverse in the new year as he seeks to reassert control over the party. But even better party management is no guarantee that he will govern in the interest of the country.

Can Starmer and the government overcome failure, as Dyson would hope, and reckon honestly with the scale of the challenges we face, from state failure and unsustainable welfare spending to a broken immigration system and economic stagnation? Or is Starmer’s Labour, like the Bazballers before their Ashes defeat, condemned to what Nietzsche called eternal recurrence: through carelessness doomed to repeat the same mistakes while expecting a different outcome?