The first few days of a totally new government are disorientating. Nobody knows quite how to react. The electoral dust is still settling. We are still in the process of recalibrating well-worn reflexes: rolling your eyes and tutting about Jeremy Hunt and David Cameron is no longer a thing, for they are no longer things. What do all the people on social media who ranted endlessly about ‘getting the Tories out’ do now, with their mission accomplished? When Carol Vorderman wakes up in the morning now, what is her first thought, her catalyst for the day?
It’s rather like a new series of Big Brother – a bewildering array of fresh faces in a familiar setting. It takes a little while for their foibles and synergies to reveal themselves. Where Labour is concerned, many of the newbies in the cabinet are not just unfamiliar but unknown – who the hell are Ian Murray and Jonathan Reynolds?
These are the sensible people, are they?
But one thing is already clear, exemplified by Keir Starmer’s victory speech in Downing Street and his first press conference as Prime Minister. This is to be an administration of quiet competence, putting ‘country before party’, ‘treading lightly’ on our lives, sensible and calm, practical and pragmatic.
As always, you have to work out what Starmer actually means – or wants you to think he means – with his current tack. ‘Unburdened by doctrine’ is his phrase du jour, one that is just begging fate to make highly ironic. It fits very neatly with his head shaking, disappointed-in-you, you’ve let the school down, you’ve let yourself down 2024 persona. ‘Dear dear, here I come, everyone deserves respect and dignity and we must behave very nicely and everybody needs to calm down because look how reasonable I’m being.’ This is passive aggression elevated to an art form, pure vibes.
‘The adults are back in the room’ is the bum-clenchingly awful cliché of this vibe. But what does this actually mean? As long as the aesthetic of sensibleness, competence, ‘seriousness’ is there, you don’t have to actually be any of those things – just look as if you are.
These sensible, calm, unburdened by doctrine public-service minded people, lest we forget, include new Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who not many years ago calmly and sensibly compared the Tories’ ERG group to the Nazis. In fact, when challenged on this insane remark he doubled down, saying it ‘wasn’t strong enough’. Minister for Women Anneliese Dodds can’t define ‘woman’, which you’d think was a prerequisite of the job.
Meanwhile, the supposedly reasonable Wes Streeting took to Twitter on the eve of the recent London mayoral election to suggest that a win for the Tory candidate would be ‘a win for racists, white supremacists and Islamophobes the world over’. Culture minister Lisa Nandy fairly recently opined that male rapists should be housed in women’s prisons if they feel like it. Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood has a history of enthusiastic participation in mob protests to shut down supermarkets selling Israeli goods.
These are the sensible people, are they? Spare a thought for Sue Gray and Morgan McSweeney, those shadowy figures who seem to be behind Keir’s new steer. They will be sweating cobs at the thought of Anneliese Dodds getting anywhere near a microphone.
But they needn’t fret. Sticking to an effective illusion is all it takes, especially with our sensible media.
We hear a lot about ‘serious’ people and ‘not serious’ people. This seems to come from the final series of Succession, where Logan Roy told his offspring, ‘You are not serious people.’ It’s a devastating line in a fantastic scene. What everybody seems to have overlooked is that ‘serious person’ Logan Roy had driven his business into the ground, and was, shortly before his death, trying to get his latest floozy a job before the cameras with comically disastrous results.
It’s tempting to think this spin cannot work. But it worked for Blair, for years, in which he successfully trashed the country – possibly irretrievably – while maintaining an aura of quiet competence. If everything looks right, and everybody is behaving reasonably on the surface, a government can get away with pretty much anything. The correct tone – the illusion of sweet reason – is all that you need, as you tear the place apart.
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