Samworth Brothers are the biggest producers of pork pies in Britain. Or so they claim. I suspect they will find at the end of this financial year that they have very stiff competition from a new producer in the field, Sir Keir Rodney Starmer.
Except it isn’t just porkies that Sir Keir indulges in. Today we saw the full gamut of his honesty allergy: evasion, obfuscation, straw-manning and gaslighting were all deployed as he wriggled and squealed like it was Melton Mowbray market day.
The specific topic which gave us this show of Sir Keir at his worst was China. While he’s been busy in Egypt, being batted off by Donald Trump and watching Adolescence for the fifty-thousandth time, yet another scandal has been quietly enfolding his listing and useless government.
Robert Conquest once observed that ‘the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies’. It now appears that, in the case of this most bureaucratic of governments, this may well be literally true, as the Chinese seem to have their hands on all sorts of levers.
Sir Keir tried to pre-empt the obvious questions about China with a long-winded statement to the House before PMQs. It was two-pronged but along classic Starmerite lines. Firstly, the classic claim that thing he had been backed into doing after days of avoiding – in this case publishing witness statements from the deputy national security adviser – was actually something he was very happy to do, thank you very much. Not only this but it should also bring an end to scrutiny even though the million-yuan question – what engagement Jonathan Powell, government ministers and the No. 10 team had with the case and when – remains unanswered. Secondly, everything is the fault of the Tories. We all know the lines; the delivery never changes. This is panto but written by Franz Kafka. Oh ja, das ist es, oh nein, das ist es nicht, et cetera.
Proceedings began with one of the identikit dignity vacuums from the government backbenches asking a question about cataracts. A clouded vision, the result of speedy degeneration and leading to impaired judgement and perception; the Labour party has been in power since July 2024.
The back and forth with Mrs Badenoch took a predictable turn. She brought up the obfuscation and duplicity in the PM’s statements, he proceeded to selectively quote her and James Cleverly to show how everything wasn’t his fault. In Sir Keir’s world, Adam and Eve weren’t naked in the Garden of Eden but instead were wearing blue rosettes.
Having previously denied it, eventually Starmer conceded that the meeting led by Jonathan Powell and Sir Olly Robbins, widely reported as having caused the collapse of the spy trial, had taken place but it ‘did not involve the national security adviser discussing the evidence in any way’. He painted a picture of a meeting where people arrived but nothing happened and nothing was said. What, then, did this meeting consist of? Information communicated through interpretive dance? Some kind of elaborate mime-off? Or perhaps it was more like Woodstock – if you can remember it then you weren’t there, man.
This was Starmer at his lawyerly worst
Mrs Badenoch presented him with a pretty incontrovertible fact: ‘The spies were charged under a Conservative government and let off under Labour.’ (The two men firmly deny the charges, of course.) More wriggling, this time getting into the nitty gritty of what a threat is. Apparently the Tories failing to call China a threat enough times meant Labour couldn’t do anything about it. An excuse so feeble that it makes ‘the dog ate my homework’ look like the defence speech in To Kill A Mockingbird.
This was Starmer at his lawyerly worst: smug, patronising, utterly convinced that any problem can be buried under procedure. By the end he was even pushing back the publication of the witness statements – ‘there’s a bit of proper process I need to go to’. Cue an image of Sir Keir, late at night in No. 10, chewing on his tongue as he tries to tippex out any reference to Jonathan Powell. Immediately after the statement, James Cleverly delivered a point of order explaining how Starmer had deliberately misquoted him. Even the whataboutery had been a fib. Starmer strode off, grinning, as cries of ‘false!’ rang out around him.
In her final speech Mrs Badenoch quoted Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary, who said that the government was being ‘economical with the truth’. With what remains of free speech in this country perhaps we can go a step further. Sir Keir Starmer is a liar: and not even a very good one at that. Watch out, Melton Mowbray.
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