How many resets does it take to make a doom loop? In another attempt to work out what the problem with his government is – and with all the mirror salesmen in the capital presumably on holiday – Keir Starmer has done another mini-reshuffle. ‘Phase two of my government starts today’ he says in a fatuous video clip, deploying that nasal whine which you had probably mercifully forgotten over the recess.
The image of the PM squeezed into those gimpy little shorts postmen wear is not one that anybody wants
Obviously all this isn’t actually phase two but probably closer to phase 14. This time it’s involved the mass import of people from a thing called ‘The Resolution Foundation’. It sounds like one of those organisations set up by upper-class socialists in the 1930s which advocated for the forced sterilisation of people who wore glasses and then went mysteriously quiet after 1945. Actually, it’s almost as malign: a group of weedy freaks who have never worked anywhere other than leftist think tank world yet still have very strong opinions on how much of your money the state should be pocketing. Clue: a lot. These are the people now running the economy: it’s going to be like Children of the Corn but directed by Richard Curtis.
Alongside the exultation of these weird nerds has come the apotheosis of Darren Jones. Jones says his hero is Tony Blair and has enjoyed the absolute archetypal Labour rise; student union politics to the NHS to legal activism to a perpetual paper candidate before being gifted a safe seat. For him to become the PM’s Chief Secretary, or senior enforcer, felt grimly inevitable. The one silver lining is that this new role seems to be modelled on the Principal Secretary who worked for the Tudor monarchs. Welcome to Wolf Hall: the LinkedIn Years.
Alongside his embarrassing motivational clip, Starmer decided to launch this with an even stranger interview with Matt Chorley in Downing Street itself. He began by going through a weird ‘Changing Rooms’ style description of the cabinet room. ‘There’s a long table with lots of chairs round it for all the members of the cabinet’. Presumably David Lammy’s has his name on it, whilst Big Ange’s is suspended over a shark pit.
He then introduced phase two, which is apparently about ‘delivery, delivery, delivery’. ‘Delivery is absolutely the key word’, ‘focus on this delivery’ etc. It all made him sound like a sort of fanatical postman. The image of the PM squeezed into those gimpy little shorts they now make postmen wear is not one that anybody wants.
Whenever Starmer tries to appear normal, he ends up sounding like a mixture of David Brent and the acid bath murderer. As he was asked about the proliferation of flags across the country, there came some absolutely classic examples of the genre. ‘I’m a supporter of flags’, he began. ‘I always sit in front of the Union Jack’, he insisted. Always? I can just imagine a flunky following the PM around – to his local, on trains, as he goes to the lavatory, just to ensure he is always in the presence of a Union Jack. Determined to make things even weirder, Starmer informed Chorley that he had a St George’s Flag up in his flat, as if he was trying to entice him upstairs in order to kill and eat him.
In other tricky questions, the PM was asked about Ange and her big house giveaway. The PM insisted that briefing against her was ‘a big mistake’, which, given his allies have spent previous summers doing so, suggests he is capable of at least some form of learning curve. There then came the priceless moment when he accidentally referred to her as ‘a great prime minister’. After gobbling like a turkey into the airwaves to correct himself, he then said that ordinary people would look at Rayner in the deputy’s office and think, ‘I could do that’. Yes, I’m sure a lot of people do.
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