Is nomenclature destiny? If Keir Starmer had not been named for Keir Hardie, the founding father of the Labour party, but rather had his middle name ‘Rodney’ as his first, would he have still gone for the job as Labour leader? Might he have continued rather in the highly remunerative law career which made him Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013? Instead he became an MP in 2015, leader of the Labour party in 2020 and – if he doesn’t start killing kittens while tittering on TikTok in the interim – next prime minister of the United Kingdom in 2024.
But there’s just something which doesn’t yell ‘Venceremos!’ about the man otherwise known as Captain Hindsight, Sir Shifty and (Boris, on fine Beano form) ‘Captain Crasheroonie Snoozefest’. Is it the robotic aspect? He often has what I call Resting Glitch Face, like something’s not computing; that ‘uncanny valley’ feeling, or as Gertrude Stein said of her childhood hometown: ‘There’s no ‘there’ there.’
Sometimes he looks like he’s trying hard to remember something; why he went into politics in the first place, perhaps? What he believes in this year? Then there’s that slightly stunned look – ‘How did I get here?’ – giving him a somewhat Chance the Gardener aspect, though he is obviously ambitious as all-get-out. (Ambition used to be such a sexy thing; Starmer makes it seem about as racy as being regular.) His other frequent face – that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger one – reminds me of that teacher who wasn’t cross, just disappointed, but who might one day *snap* if the class continued to play the fool.
Sometimes he looks like he’s trying hard to remember something; why he went into politics in the first place, perhaps?
Starmer is hard to pin down socially, veering between righteous working-class and slippery lower-middle. He was born in London – but raised in Surrey. He was the son of a nurse and a toolmaker – but he attended the selective state Reigate Grammar School, which conveniently became a private school while he was a student. Among his classmates were the musician Norman Cook, now Fat Boy Slim, alongside whom Starmer took violin lessons. He also played the recorder, flute and piano; was this apparently prosaic man moved by music as a youth? It’s both amusing and somehow sad to think of this.
But there was undoubtedly a spark of something – if not not a fully-fledged fire – in the belly of the young Starmer. In 1986, he declaimed in Socialist Alternatives that trade unions should have had control over ‘industry and community’ which sounds a bit Bolshevik. In Socialist Lawyer (snigger) awhile later he claimed that ‘Karl Marx was, of course right!’ As recently as 2020, he described himself as a socialist motivated by a ‘burning desire to tackle inequality and injustice’. But by 2021, when asked if he was an S-word, asked innocently ‘What does that mean?’ In 2022, he proudly boasted that he’d seen off the ten socialist pledges he made in the 2020 party leadership contest. In 2023, he set out five goals for his government, targeting economic growth, health, clean energy, crime and education. Why not add Mom and apple pie – or, to give it a Brit twist, Mum and Greggs pasties – and be done with it?
Though I don’t like the Labour Left, you can see why they get teed off with their vainglorious leader. (Not so much publicly now, of course – there’s no curb for a rebellious tongue like the whiff of power.) The electorate are cross with the Conservatives for not actually being conservative (13 years in government and all the major institutions have fallen to gender woo-woo and racially-divisive claptrap) and though they’re accepting Labour without socialism, they’d probably be quite happy with nationalisation and rationing, just to feel that we’re not wasting our lives away treading water in the shallow end of modern civilisation. Whether it’s the Empire or Swinging London or Brexit, this nation likes to feel we’ve got a bit of something going on. We’re not Luxembourg or Liechtenstein, we want to be in the front row at the power-dressing fashion show.
Are we really going to get our mojo back with the likes of what Starmer came up with when asked to define Starmerism (even typing that word made me feel vaguely despairing) by Time magazine this year? ‘Recognising that our economy needs to be fixed. Recognising that [solving] climate change isn’t just an obligation; it’s the single biggest opportunity that we’ve got for our country going forward. Recognising that public services need to be reformed, that every child and every place should have the best opportunities and that we need a safe environment, safe streets, et cetera.’ He actually said et cetera!
Fitzgerald wrote that ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’ In that case, Starmer’s a super-brain; he’s the man who believes that ’99.9 per cent’ of women don’t have a penis, who campaigned for Corbyn while married to a Jewish woman, the man of the people who snaffled a knighthood, the respecter of Brexit who ‘does not want to diverge’ from EU rules. Perhaps because of this, the More In Common word-cloud which the party leaders are amusingly shown on the Laura Kuenssberg Sunday politics show, reflecting what the politician stands for in the public mind, featured the words: NO IDEA, NOT SURE and NOTHING. Reassurance rather than revolution is Starmer’s brand of socialism – but the fact that he looks terrified a lot of the time doesn’t help. Vowing that he would ‘smash’ the trafficking gangs as he had once ‘smashed’ international terrorists, I was reminded of the old comedic catchline: ‘Ooo, I could crush a grape!’
The lunatics will surely re-take the asylum if not firmly muzzled
The Left are quiet – but they haven’t gone away by any means, and if they get a whiff of defeat, they’ll pounce. I recall the lovely bit of sport prime minister Johnson had with Starmer after the 2021 sacking and subsequent swift promotion of Angela Rayner; a carer for her sick mother at the age of ten, a mother herself at 16, an MP at 34, a grandmother at 36 – and as such the last person that this ‘stale, pale male’ should have picked a fight with. After being removed from her role as the Labour Party’s chair and national campaign coordinator on 8 May, she was appointed as shadow first secretary of state, shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for future of work on the 9 May; images of a wildly revolving door accompanied by the Benny Hill theme tune came irresistibly to mind.
Johnson had a lovely time in the House of Commons a few days later, pretending to be a TV wildlife commentator:
’In any pride of lions, it is the male who tends to occupy the position of nominal authority, but the most dangerous beast, the prize hunter of the pack is in fact the lioness…I’m (sure) Sir Keir bears this in mind as he contemplates his friend – the deputy leader, the shadow first secretary of state, the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for the future of work – though the more titles he feeds her, the hungrier I fear she is likely to become.’
The lunatics will surely re-take the asylum if not firmly muzzled; see John McDonnell slithering around conference calling the Sunak government ‘fascist’ and damning Starmer with the very faintest of praise:
‘He is a lucky general. To be honest, we haven’t done an awful lot to gain power, but the Tories have done enough to fall apart… It’s like winning an election by default.’
Elsewhere Hamas were being fawned over by fringe loonies – one speaker said she was ‘honoured’ to be speaking at such a ‘historic moment’ – with all the restraint of a teenage birthday party outing at a Taylor Swift show. Meanwhile, the shadow minister Afzal Khan posed happily at the stand of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the wake of Saturday’s Pogrom on Israel.
What would the no-nonsense founders of the Labour party make of a fringe speaker announcing that a bunch of child-killing maniacs ‘ascended to martyrdom at the hands of the Zionist entity’? Indeed, what would Hardie make of Starmer? He’d probably be quite puzzled by the talk of these mysterious women with penises that the Labour Leader still clings to; if 99.9 per cent of women don’t have penises, that still leaves quite a lot who do, as women are half of humanity. O brave new world, that has such folx in it!
Anticipating the election, it’s hard not to feel underwhelmed. It’s an understatement to say that Sunak and Starmer are not Big Beasts; thinking of them going at it, it’s less Reagan and Chernenko in ‘Two Tribes’ and more a pair of sugar-fuelled pre-schoolers grizzling in a soft-ball play-pit. The malaise we’re feeling is not a British thing, despite what the Remoaners would have us believe; it’s not about Brexit, because France feels it too – so does the doddery USA, ruined Russia, corruptly-governed Africa, declining China and the murderous Middle East. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is having the screaming ab-dabs; to contradict Harold Macmillan, the feeling is that we’ve never had it so bad. Who better than a man who appears permanently dismayed to lead us further into our decline?
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