When a nickname really hits its target, there is a satisfying beauty about it: a quippy sobriquet that catches the attention and goes to the heart of some aspect of a person’s character. It is a measure of the Conservative party’s inability to get a convincing hold on Sir Keir Starmer that they have tried tag after tag – Captain Hindsight, Sir Softy, the dismal Captain Crasheroony Snoozefest – but none has yet found its mark.
To real nail Starmer and come up with a nickname that sticks, the Tories should perhaps look across the pond for inspiration. Donald Trump, for all his faults, is in a category of his own when it comes to damning an opponent with a nickname. Crooked Hillary (Clinton), Sloppy Steve (Bannon), Sleepy Joe (Biden), Lyin Ted (Cruz) and Low-Energy Jeb (Bush) were all monikers that were hard to overcome.
Thatcher’s ‘Iron Lady’ epithet was originally meant as an insult
Political nicknames didn’t start with Trump, of course. Modern British politics is stuffed with inspiration for those trying to sum up Starmer. But Tories trying to capture something of the Labour leader in a memorable phrase should be careful: nicknames can end up backfiring.
Margaret Thatcher’s epithet of ‘the Iron Lady’ was originally intended as an insult. A year after she became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, Thatcher gave a typically trenchant anti-Communist speech which accused the Soviet Union of seeking world dominance. A run-of-the-mill Red Army mouthpiece, Krasnaya Zvezda, hit back in unremarkable terms under the headline ‘Zheleznaya Dama Ugrozhayet‘, ‘Iron Lady Wields Threats’. By chance, Reuters’ Moscow chief picked up the phrase, Thatcher saw it and grabbed it with both hands, and repeated it in a speech on 31 January 1976. It stuck, because it was brilliantly apposite – an instant political persona.
A previous Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had similarly benefited from what began as a slight. He had succeeded Sir Anthony Eden in 1957 as the disastrous Suez Crisis played out, and entered Downing Street without optimism, telling the Queen his government might not last six weeks. But he survived, he steadied his party, and the economy started to boom.
In September 1958, the Evening Standard’s cartoonist ‘Vicky’ (Victor Weisz) sketched the PM as a superhero, caped and soaring into the air above the dismissive caption: ‘How to Try to Continue to be Top Without Actually Having Been There’. He dubbed the character ‘Supermac’. Somehow it worked. The country was emerging from the long shadow of post-war austerity and Macmillan, though an anxiety-ravaged intellectual in his sixties, had a weird streak of Edwardian showmanship. Unexpectedly, the nickname summed him up, and a year later he led his party to a decisive third election victory.
A pithy summation can be damaging too. H.H. Asquith, prime minister from 1908 to 1916 and the last man to lead a Liberal majority government, came to the premiership in his pomp. He was 55, a distinguished KC who had been raised in the glory of Jowett-era Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1870s, and had served first as home secretary then chancellor of the Exchequer. He worked quickly and efficiently but believed in an enviable work/life balance, and was fond of good drink, congenial company and, increasingly passionately but without hope, his daughter’s friend Venetia Stanley.
It is impossible to pinpoint when Asquith picked up the nickname ‘Old Squiffy’, a pun on his name but also a reference to his drinking. It might not have mattered, but his premiership was dogged by challenges and then engulfed by the First World War. In 1912, on a trip to Sicily, Asquith seems to have fallen wholly in love with Stanley, 35 years his junior, and the personal and professional disappointments drove him to drink more heavily. Within Westminster, ‘Squiffy’ became a self-perpetuating reputation: he was occasionally found incapable in the evenings, and some women preferred to keep a table between themselves and the emotional PM.
But by the time the war had come, music hall legend George Robey was singing to guffawing audiences:
Mr Asquith says in a manner sweet and calm:
Another little drink won’t do us any harm.
They laughed because they knew what he was singing about. By the end of 1916, when David Lloyd George sought to displace Asquith as head of government, Squiffy had neither the credibility nor the energy to resist.
Some epithets miss the target in the way Tory efforts with Starmer have done so far. Private Eye dubbed Edward Heath ‘Grocer Heath’ in 1964 after he angered shopkeepers by abolishing resale price maintenance. Characteristically of the Eye, it would not let the identification go; writing in this magazine in 2016, Richard Ingrams, one of the Eye’s founders, was still calling Heath ‘Grocer…as he will always be for me’. But it never really achieved universality, because it said little about the core of the man. Heath was a stiff, awkward man, over-aware of his own dignity, but he was also clever and hard-working, a gifted musician and an Admiral’s Cup-winning yachtsman. ‘The Grocer’ shone a light on none of these characteristics.
Reaching further back in time, you find nicknames which might have resonated at the time but, given the intervening decades or centuries, now mostly perplex or confound. A.J. Balfour, the brilliant but intellectually aloof and detached premier who succeeded his uncle the Marquess of Salisbury in 1902, was known as ‘Pretty Fanny’, supposedly for his delicate manners. The diminutive Whig Lord John Russell, prime minister from 1846 to 1852 and again from 1865 to 1866, supported the Great Reform Act 1832 only as a last measure of liberalisation and thenceforth carried the name ‘Finality Jack’. George III’s favourite, John, 3rd Earl of Bute, was widely disliked but elbowed his way briefly into the premiership in 1762-63 and gave punning rise to a more general term for a stupid person: ‘Jack Boot’.
Some unhappy PMs never achieve nickname status in their time: the records are largely silent on Andrew Bonar Law (1922-23) and the Earl of Rosebery (1894-95). The best must have spontaneity but, more importantly, they should have a shaft of authenticity, striking a chord that eventually brings a nod of recognition. After that, it is the luck of the draw: you can vault upwards through pithy and potent publicity, or you can carry a mark, some sign of a defect, which you will never shake off. Perhaps the reason the Tories haven’t managed to capture Starmer in a single nickname is that he’s plain and forgettable. But, if so, that’s bad news for Labour if it hopes voters will make him prime minister next year.
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