Still making headlines, it seems, is one of the more trivial scandals to have dogged the Labour government in its first 100 days in office: to wit, the police protection given to the pop singer Taylor Swift. File firmly under circuses, you might think, rather than bread.
For those who need catching up, the American pop star was given a VVIP police escort around London during the UK leg of her Eras tour – a swishy blue-light motorcade of the sort usually reserved for members of the royal family and foreign heads of state, and the reassuring knowledge that should some loon seek to lob a brick at her, or worse, Tay-Tay could rely on London’s finest to pile in with their side-handled batons and/or firearms.
The issue at hand is that such protection, provided at the expense of the taxpayer, is indeed usually reserved for members of the royal family and foreign heads of state. It’s kind of a rule. And it’s kind of a rule that was overcome – against the initial protests of the Met itself – only after intense backstage lobbying by the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan and, it now emerges, the Attorney General Lord Hermer KC himself.
What’s more, it emerged soon after the event that both Khan and Cooper had enjoyed freebie tickets to Taylor Swift’s concerts (neither cheap nor easy to come by for the rest of us). As so often with these wretched characters, it’s not a good look.
The thing is, had they been prepared to forgo the chance to shake a tailfeather at the concerts, Cooper and Khan could have made a full-throated case for the necessity of providing police protection for Taylor Swift in the first place. And the case would have been this one.
VVIP protection for the royal family, like VVIP protection for foreign heads of state, has a reasonably clear rationale. It is that the national interest, in the form of soft power, is served by these characters. Diplomacy helps trade, the royals lend a bit of stardust to diplomacy, and even if it costs the taxpayer to fuel all those whizzy police motorbikes we end up, as a nation, up on the deal.
Taylor Swift may be a private individual, technically speaking, but it’s probably more practical to think of her as a foreign head of state. Her soft power is beyond question: it’s no coincidence that Donald Trump’s tantrum at her when she failed to endorse his presidential candidacy closely resembled his tantrum at North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un. She even has an army – as anyone who has said anything disobliging about her online has discovered to their cost.
Taylor Swift may be a private individual, technically speaking, but it’s probably more practical to think of her as a foreign head of state
It has for many years now been acknowledged that the world’s biggest private corporations have political clout and control more money than most of the world’s nation states. If you go back to the British East India company, you could say that this isn’t even, necessarily, a situation unique to the modern globalised age. Taylor Swift is, I’d suggest, one such case.
Though it’s hard to put a precise figure on it, the Eras tour was widely argued to have contributed something like a billion pounds to the UK economy, what with all those ticket sales, merch, hotels, train tickets, and tax revenue from the very many hundreds of thousands of Barcadi Breezers sold at the venues. There will be any number of Ruritanian dignitaries whizzed up the Mall with full honours whose country’s potential contribution to our national wealth will be a measly fraction of that. And let’s not even get started on Prince Andrew.
What’s more, it wasn’t just to serve her vanity that Taylor Swift wanted an escort. Her preceding concerts in Vienna had to be cancelled after the police there foiled a plot to stage a suicide-bombing at the venue. The Southport stabbings were fresh in everybody’s mind. And Taylor’s mum Andrea, who is also her manager, had said publicly that she was considering cancelling the London leg of the tour. Had she been assassinated on our soil, it would rightly or wrongly have been seen as a black mark against our national prestige. And had she failed to turn up at all, I fear not even Liz Truss’s trade deal with Australia would have been sufficient to stop our national economy returning to the thirteenth century.
I may not like it. You may not like it. In a sane world, we might think, it would be Half-Man Half-Biscuit who received police protection on billion-dollar tours of the United States, rather than Taylor Swift. But we are a diminished power. Having lost an Empire, we need to find ourselves a role, and this appears to be it. On consideration, we can remove this one from the file marked ‘circuses’ and put it into the file marked ‘bread’.
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