Sam Leith Sam Leith

Keir Starmer’s Easter message wasn’t offensive

(Photo: Getty)

Fun though it is to bash Keir Starmer for everything he says or does, there’s surely a point at which the self-respecting anti-Starmerite will want to cut the man a bit of slack – if for no other reason than that if the spite grows too ridiculous you will sound deranged, and it will recruit the odd floating voter to his cause out of sympathy. 

Such a point, I submit, might be the Prime Minister’s Easter message. Sir Keir, or some minion, put out a tweet yesterday saying the following: ‘Wishing a very happy Easter to Christians across the UK and around the world, as they celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As we look to the future with hope, I want to thank Christians for their huge contributions to our country.’ 

A more milquetoast, a more bland, a more ecumenical, a more tediously benign tweet it would be hard to find. If you asked ChatGPT, ‘write me a dull and inoffensive Prime Ministerial message on the occasion of a religious holiday’, this is probably what you’d end up with. It’s not impossible, come to think of it, that that was indeed the process.  

But some people – snowflakes, you might decide to call them – are simply determined to be offended. The winged monkeys of X/Twitter swarmed the tweet. Some bores were outraged that Sir Keir had talked about ‘the resurrection of Jesus Christ’ as if it were a historical fact – we’re in the reality-based community, yeah? – and presumably thought that a more appropriate Easter message would have read ‘celebrate the supposed resurrection of Jesus Christ, the deluded idiots’.  

But most of the respondents were exercised, rather, by the second sentence of the tweet. How very dare Sir Keir thank Christians for their ‘huge contributions to our country’? ‘Contribution is an insult,’ thought one tweeter. ‘Western values, laws, tolerance, human rights… the ABSOLUTE and TOTAL FOUNDATIONS of ALL western society is because of Christianity,’ thought another. ‘It is a Christian country, we don’t contribute to it, it is ours,’ thought still another. And so on, and so forth, with minor variations in the distribution of punctuation and capital letters.  

So the complaint, in effect, was not that Sir Keir had praised Christians. It was that he hadn’t praised them enough. Shades, here, of President Zelenskyy’s punishment beating in the White House, where J.D. Vance whined: ‘Have you said thank you once this entire meeting?’ Sir Keir hadn’t, as was apparently preferable, made clear that Christians were the only people who had anything to contribute to the virtues of modern Britain. His job had apparently been to say that Christianity was the most important faith and that the rest are here under sufferance, and he fluffed it.  

I don’t deny that there’s a very good argument that what we like to call ‘western values’, and Britain’s established institutions as those of most of Europe, are substantially Christian legacies. The historian Tom Holland has made this case admirably. Even where our populace is not majority Christian, our nation’s legal and constitutional set-up is culturally Christian by inheritance. 

 But is it possible to point out in Sir Keir’s defence that in ‘wanting to thank Christians for their contributions’ he was addressing (because he isn’t a maniac) the Christians who might be able to receive and appreciate that thanks, i.e. the ones who are alive right now and on Twitter. To be outraged on behalf of William Tyndale, John Milton, Thomas More and Odo of Bayeux because a two-sentence tweet in 2025 doesn’t do, as you see it, sufficient honour to their legacy is, simply, mental.  

In the last census, just under half of the population claimed to identify as Christian. That represents a wide range of degrees of faith and commitment. Regular churchgoers in the Church of England stand just under a million these days, which is about a percentage and a half of the population – so they are indeed a small minority. They do, many of them, outstanding good works. They make contributions and they deserve thanks for it, and the way Sir Keir phrased that appreciation seemed entirely appropriate.

I mean, how is he supposed to win? If he hadn’t sent a friendly and respectful tweet in celebration of Easter, the same numpties would be lambasting him for his ‘woke’ refusal to acknowledge a Christian holiday and digging out every tweet he’d ever sent saying something friendly and respectful about Rosh Hashanah or Eid. And had he sent a tweet, as they apparently hoped, saying ‘down with the Muslims and the Jews: we’re a Christian country and if you don’t like it you can buzz off back to the Middle East’, that would not have looked all that prime ministerial. Starting a holy war isn’t really what Easter is all about.  

I’m reminded, a little, of a Bill Hicks routine in which the late comedian describes having played a show somewhere in the Bible belt, during which he delivered some characteristically blasphemous jibes. Afterwards, he said, he was cornered in the parking lot by some riled-up members of the audience. ‘Hey buddy, we’re Christians, and we don’t like what you said…’ they said, advancing, menacingly. Hicks, perkily: ‘Then forgive me.’ 

Same thing. If you’re active on Twitter, and you find yourself driven into blood-vessel-popping indignation by the Prime Minister’s bland and benign and entirely inoffensive tweet, you might want to go out and touch some grass. Or, y’know, turn the other cheek.   

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