‘Nurse! Nurse! He’s out again!’ That’s right, Sir Keir had escaped his handlers and was mingling with the public once more. This time he was ruining the coffee break of some workers at McLaren to talk about apprenticeships. Presumably he takes any opportunity he can to avoid the company of his own MPs at the moment, morale being about the same as it was on HMS Bounty a minute or two before the mutiny.
Sir Keir was introduced by Pat McFadden, the cadaverous figure whom Labour trot out when things are going particularly badly. It was like having Nosferatu as your warm-up act. Yet even with this inauspicious intro, Sir Keir still managed to look like the weirder one of the pair.
He began with a typically normal thing to say: ‘I find it really uplifting and you must find it really uplifting to work here.’ As he did this initial garbling the woman behind him gave a side-eye of unbridled contempt.
‘I hope you’ve all got a smile on your faces,’ he said, with a gurn, as he introduced his now-standard pop culture reference and tried to get some credit for Lando Norris’s win at the weekend. Hilariously everyone behind him, including McFadden, continued to look absolutely miserable.
In many ways this was vintage Starmer; the familiar Greek chorus of disgruntled workers stood behind him, and we even got the ‘my dad was a toolmaker’ schtick. The PM had an air of desperation to him; he looked and sounded like a washed-up telly comic doing panto to stave off bankruptcy. Of course, in many ways he is doing panto, but it seems only to make national bankruptcy more likely.
He gabbled awkwardly about how university and apprenticeships were the same: ‘it’s every bit as difficult as going to university and doing a law degree, which is what I did’. Again, there is a sort of baseline weirdness to Starmer’s interactions with the general public which is under-reported. He’s like an alien who is just attempting its first imitations of human interaction.
All this was even with the fact that all the questions were dull, stage-managed affairs parroted by young people about the apprenticeship scheme. There was something almost North Korean about the contrivance of having ‘questions’ from the audience. Indeed the same question – about making sure apprenticeships were put on the same footing as university education – was basically asked twice. None of them got to ask the question they presumably wanted to pose, indeed the question on so many of our lips, which was ‘why are you here?’
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