Ed Davey has built an entire political career on pratfalls, water slides and staged wipe-outs, like a children’s entertainer who accidentally wandered into Westminster. Paddleboarding into the lake, hurling himself down a slip ’n’ slide, spinning on teacups at Thorpe Park, he’s like one of those tragically comic idiot acts on Britain’s Got Talent, selected specifically to be mocked by the entire nation, because at least it gets people talking. Davey long ago realised that nobody would ever remember him for policies, ideas, or even basic charisma. So instead he appears to have branded himself as the nation’s soggiest clown and seems content with that level of respect and notoriety.
Davey’s refusal to attend a banquet is the political equivalent of a toddler sulking at the dinner table
It is in this spirit that his latest stunt must be understood: boycotting the King’s state banquet for Donald Trump in protest over Gaza… Whatever.
What Davey has done here is epitomise the politics of performance, and in doing so, he has stumbled into perfect alignment with the wider free-free-Palestine-globalise-the-intifada-LGBTQIA-for-Hamas-just-stop-oil protest culture. For, like Davey, they appear animated not by serious strategy but by a desperate need for recognition and causing a nuisance.
Both thrive on spectacle because substance seems beyond them. The protesters with their red paint and terrorist-supporting placards, chanting slogans that never shift a single fact on the ground in Gaza are, at bottom, engaged in the same enterprise as Davey with his boycott: trying to wring meaning from futility by staging attention-grabbing gestures. Palestinianism in the West, like Lib Dem politics, has long since traded seriousness for melodrama and theatre.
Underlying it all is futility. Just as the marches, sit-ins, and slogans change nothing in Israel, Gaza, or Washington, so too will Davey’s empty chair at Buckingham Palace register nowhere outside his own living room. For who will truly notice his absence from the banquet anyway? Donald Trump will not notice his absence. King Charles will not notice his absence. Most of Britain will not notice his absence. If anything, this stunt implicitly acknowledges that Trump and the King would be less likely to notice him if he did turn up. Such is the measure of Davey’s irrelevance to British politics, let alone to world affairs.
The absurdity is compounded by the target he has chosen. Of all the men to ‘punish’ with his absence, Donald Trump is the most ludicrous candidate. Trump is the American president who has done more to reshape the modern Middle East than any other in living memory. Through the Abraham Accords, he brought Israel into formal diplomatic relations with Arab states that had for decades kept Israel at arm’s length. He applied real pressure on Iran and eventually massively damaged its nuclear programme with direct strikes. He shifted the strategic map in a way no European leader, and certainly no British prime minister, has managed. Even in the current war, Trump has done more to help secure the release of hostages from Hamas than any world leader outside Israel itself.
Of course, Trump himself is no stranger to political theatre and stunts. The difference is that the American President commands. Just two weeks ago he welcomed Vladimir Putin to Alaska, only to have the very aircraft fly over his head that had just obliterated most of Iran’s nuclear programme. Shortly after, he led European leaders through the White House past a painting of himself rising, bloodied but unbowed, from his assassination attempt, before sitting them down in the Oval Office to address them like errant schoolchildren. These were not empty spectacles, they were demonstrations of power: theatre with consequence. By contrast, Davey’s refusal to attend a banquet is the political equivalent of a toddler sulking at the dinner table. He imagines a power play, but what he has staged is a petulant pout.
Against Trump’s record, Ed Davey’s little gesture looks pathetic. A man who cannot seem to secure relevance within his own country without playing the political equivalent of Mr Bean imagines that he can make a statement that might reverberate across Washington and Jerusalem. It is the theatre of the powerless, the hollow performance of someone who knows he cannot make policy, cannot shape events, cannot do anything but wave his arms for attention and hope that someone, somewhere, will remember he exists.
And yet, perhaps Davey knows all this. Perhaps he recognises that the only way he could ever be mentioned in the same sentence as Trump, Netanyahu, Gaza, or the Middle East is by pulling another stunt or by staging another bellyflop. Short of accidentally-on-purpose tripping over the King’s mahogany dining table and landing his face in the soup, how else would he attract any notice at all during the state visit?
Without this petty act, I doubt that any commentator, no world leader, no diplomat would bother to engage with what he has to say about the conflict. His opinions carry no weight, his influence is nil, his relevance non-existent. The only way Ed Davey can force his way into the conversation is to refuse to turn up for it at all.
In the end, that is why Davey is the perfect emblem of Palestinian protest politics in Britain. Empty gestures, futile theatrics, and a craving for visibility masking the apparent absence of serious strategy or consequence. The boycott will change nothing, just as the marches change nothing, just as the placards change nothing. It is attention-seeking for its own sake, a wet and flailing performance in place of leadership.
And Ed Davey, bless him, has given us yet another cheap spectacle, this time on the global stage. And still nobody is laughing.
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