We’re going to be lumbered with them for at least five years, so I think it’s time to have a good look at the incoming Labour cabinet. Not the ones we know and love of old – Thornberry, Lammy or Miliband – or Starmer and Rayner, who may still be fresh-ish, but are very well established in our minds. No, I’m talking about the assortment of front bench faces that haven’t yet stuck in our cerebellums. This lot are presently fairly anonymous and unexamined, but pretty soon they’ll be smoothly taking up the reins of their Tory predecessors with a broadly similar plan to drive the country into the ground, only a bit quicker, so we should get ourselves acquainted.
Here are my pick of the crop.
Jonathan Ashworth – My favourite. A likely lad. A bit of a ‘cheeky chappie’. If the Labour cabinet is a staff room at a failing comprehensive, with Starmer as the headmaster, Ashworth is the PE teacher, always slipping in to meetings five minutes late wearing a tracksuit and muddy boots. Ashworth is capable of car-crashing interviews on a safe issue even when his party is 25 points ahead in the polls. He is hard to actively dislike because he is so amusingly, obviously transparent. He dissembles like a toddler, with an obviously guilty and fretful expression. And he is always getting into scrapes when this happens.
It’s impossible to imagine Ashworth initiating anything. He’s the kind of Apprentice contestant that Lord Sugar would accuse of hiding in the background and riding on his teammates’ coattails. Sugar would then appoint Ashworth project manager in week five, and he’d lace biscuits with arsenic or something.
He is a solid soldier for Starmer. But at some unpredictable juncture very soon he is liable to make a ‘right plonker’ of himself. Again.
Rachel Reeves – She benefits from seeming like a normal person, though again she has that teacherish air. She cannot tell jokes but persists in attempting to tell jokes. She is fond of repeating ‘I worked for the Bank of England’ in a mistaken effort to reassure people, but this is in fact a bit like going for an interview at Hershesons salon in Belgravia and boasting about being Michael Fabricant’s personal stylist. Her books are about fascinating subjects but are unreadably, unutterably boring. But she is oddly likeable, even if you often feel that she’s going to keep everyone behind until whoever stole Liz Kendall’s lunch money owns up.
John Healey – Has one of those faces that should never, ever attempt to smile. Luckily, he seems to realise this and doesn’t do it very often. Appropriately dour.
Bridget Phillipson – One of those politicians it would be very difficult to place in a party; she could belong to any of them. Joined the Labour party aged 15, which fits in with her ‘fun, fun, fun’ demeanour. Utterly loyal, at the weekend she aped the ‘reasonable’ Starmer angle on genderism in schools, which bears no resemblance to reality. If Starmer told her to go on telly and say ‘We really have to row back on the toxic debate about the moon landings, primary school children should be encouraged to believe they were faked in Death Valley by Stanley Kubrick’, she would do it. Toes the party line on everything down to the letter, a John Selwyn Gummerian quality but with markedly different aesthetics. Difficult to fathom. But there may well be no hidden depths, only further shallows.
Wes Streeting – Feels like he should be on Radio 1 in the afternoon in 2007. His voice at the end of a sentence sometimes has the dying fall and drawn-out cadence of the mid-20th century Cockney, a speech pattern which I thought had long died out and makes me feel strangely nostalgic. Hear how he says ‘cases’ here.
“Moving from mixed-sex wards to single-sex wards is going to take time”.@wesstreeting
— What Is A Woman Campaign (@WhatIsAWomanUK) June 18, 2024
See the full interviewhttps://t.co/aoFFhJgFzS pic.twitter.com/PU5U3wPMNV
Anneliese Dodds – Off the top of my head, right here and now, I can think of about 30 women in public life, from across the political spectrum, who could do her job at Equalities better, and who have a keener grasp of the issues. Dodds goes into Father Dougal-style fugues when challenged, as if her brain can’t retain new information.
This collection of goons have slipped under the radar, overshadowed by the great Tory eccentrics and oddballs – Gove, Dorries, Rees-Mogg, etc. They may seem a little bland in comparison, but their schemes are even loopier and are almost certainly going to stuff everything up very quickly. We must swiftly learn to identify them for all the fun that lies ahead.
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