Who are Labour? Focus groups regularly report a lack of familiarity on the part of voters with His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, even with their leader. ‘Don’t know’ looms quite loudly on Keir Starmer’s focus word cloud, though dwarfed by ‘Boring’. Despite this – maybe because of it – Labour are still a good stretch ahead in the polls. A recent slight crumbliness in that lead has sparked Labour to produce attack ads which use a formulation I hadn’t seen since reading the walls at my primary school, i.e. – ‘Do you think people should wash under their arms? Janet Figgis doesn’t’ – but even these flavourful communications are all about Rishi Sunak and the Tories.
Labour might be running the country pretty soon. We should take a closer look at them, if we can remember who they are.
There is one exception to the findings of the focus groups, so let’s get her out of the way first: Angela Rayner. Possibly due to her striking appearance and the sounds she emits, voters at least know who she is. Big and/or unusual hair and a distinctive speaking voice did wonders for Boris – and ‘Ange’ and Boris share the quality of putting their big foot in it, something that the British find loveable, up to a point. Rayner is a firework going off on a damp afternoon, like having Bonnie Langford halfway down a chorus line of Am Dram hoofers. She throws the blandness and greyness of the rest into sharp relief.
For all their faults, you know the Tories are there
A couple of others are slightly familiar, fair enough, but not necessarily in a good way. Emily Thornberry is a lesser figure in the backdrop of a ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novel, the widow of a colonel, taking the Rolls to do her marketing in the main drag of Tilling. For an emissary of the party of working people, she has an unfortunate air of addressing anybody and everybody as if they were the butcher’s boy. Then there’s the Shadow Secretary of State for Climate Change and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, who as always, just looks terribly worried. This doesn’t inspire trust in someone charged with dealing with a global emergency. In a Towering Inferno situation you want Steve McQueen. Instead of rigging up a zip wire affair to get everybody down from the roof, Miliband would be commissioning an equalities impact assessment audit involving all stakeholders and communities.
The next tier down is the circle of the very faintly recognisable. Steve Reed seems – or seemed until recently – to be a fairly watery creature. But he is apparently the genius behind those nervy attack ads, and his defence of them is very reminiscent of one of those blokes who goes in to a scrap full pelt, and immediately is all very badly concealed regret; ‘Yes, and I’d thump him again!’ with a quaking lower lip. Also on this plane we have Wes Streeting, one of those loaves of bread that people think they see a face in. And Lisa Nandy, who is interesting as she gives off all the signals of being a sane human being until she actually says anything.
Anneliese Dodds appeals to that section of the electorate who are just very disappointed in you. Yvette Cooper wants you to go out and come back in properly. Rachel Reeves and Lucy Powell… and then we’re into no man’s land. I’m looking down the list of the shadow cabinet. Nick Thomas-Symonds? Who is that? My guess – a wispy folk guitarist and singer-songwriter whose sole album was released on Harvest in 1972, deleted after three months, and which now sells for £235 (mint) on Discogs. Louise Haigh? Nope me neither. Compiler of a twee book about punctuation that was a stocking filler bestseller in 2004? Bridget Phillipson? Played the anaesthetist from hell in Holby City?
And still the names keep coming. Jonathan Reynolds? Jim McMahon? Alan Whitehead? And I’m the kind of person who is interested in this stuff!
For all their faults, you know the Tories are there. Rees-Mogg, Braverman, Penny Mordaunt, Patel, Raab. It’s rather like having The Addams Family living next door to the Brady Bunch. The characterful wild-card element of Labour – Chris Bryant, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Clive Lewis – is mostly confined to the back benches, though at least David Lammy is up front. Where could you find better, smarter representatives of minority communities? By pointing randomly out of the window in any city street, that’s how.
MPs seem to divide now between the offensively bland and offensively bizarre. Labour are the faceless ones, but maybe that’s appropriate for our 21st century leaders; in office but not in power, easily swayed placeholders as even Boris turned out to be. Corporate and institutional power just steamrolls on unaccountably, over us and eventually over them.
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