We’re now about halfway through the election campaign. I don’t know how we’re going to keep our excitement from bubbling over if this level of stimulation keeps up in the second half. The staggering mediocrity and dullness of Sunak and Starmer has lent this contest – despite its inevitably very different final outcome – the air of a no-score draw played between non-league Tier 11 teams. What terrible cosmic sin did the British public commit that we are lumbered with this pair of tailors’ dummies?
This was made even more apparent by last night’s Sky interviews. Sunak and Starmer shied from confronting one another head-on – perhaps mindful of anaesthetising the population – but if they thought they were in for an easy ride, Beth Rigby was having none of it. Rigby is one of those journalists who only really comes alive in the presence of boredom. Presented with a full plate of nothing but carrots, followed shortly after by a full plate of nothing but parsnips, she went for it with pluck.
What terrible cosmic sin did the British public commit that we are lumbered with this pair of tailors’ dummies?
Talking of Sky, like Starmer I didn’t have Sky TV as a child, because like Starmer I was a child in the 1970s, when there were three tv channels that didn’t start broadcasting until lunchtime. The idea of a satellite dish on your rooftop pumping out reams of entertainment via outer space would’ve seemed like something from Moonbase Alpha. And for the life of me I can’t make out why the young Sunak felt he was missing out on Sky TV in the early 90s, when The Simpsons aside, I seem to remember it was mostly Cheggers conducting a quiz in a car park.
Starmer went first, telling us that his many outrageous – though still somehow dull – U-turns, flip-flops and volte faces were all just the result of him putting ‘country before party’. This is a masterstroke, as it gives him (if only in his own mind) a marvellous get-out clause for any caprice: ‘I’m terribly sorry I’m putting up your taxes/rationing electricity/beating this puppy repeatedly with a girder – but I’m afraid it’s for the good of the country’.
Then we came to Corbyn, thrice-denied before the rooster crowed. Unlike good evaders in such situations, Starmer looks frightened. He knows he’s lying, and he knows that we know it. He emits nanosecond microexpressions of panic, little-boy-with-his-hand-in the-biscuit-tin guilt that you can see a mile off. It’s like an episode of Road Runner where the word ‘YIKES’ appears in both of Wile E. Coyote’s eyes.
It doesn’t help that he has the voice of a constipated speak-your-weight machine. He doesn’t spark hope or joy or fear – or anything. Your eyes slide off him. You might look away for a second to check the time and he’d be gone, and ten minutes later you’d think vaguely ‘hold on, wasn’t there somebody in that chair?’
The old joke that anybody or anything else as Labour leader but Corbyn would be twenty points ahead in the polls – a sack of spuds, a donkey, even Yvette Cooper – has been, belatedly, proved true. Starmer’s job was to step back and do nothing, say nothing, be nothing and let the Tories self-destruct.
But now begins the next phase. Starmer squirming under Rigby’s heat was a sneak preview of how that’s going to go. Imagine being so bad that you lose an election to Keir Starmer.
Enter Rishi Sunak! When he first appeared a few years back, seemingly out of nowhere, Sunak had something of the daft geeky lad about him, a pocket-size version of Spike, the blundering but loveable junior yellow coat in Hi-de-Hi. That gaucheness is a lot less palatable now; indeed from the moment he went from his mortifyingly prim prefect ‘thanks PM’ at those interminable Covid press conferences to stabbing that same PM in the back, the front and the side.
His attitude to this election – ‘This time we mean it, honestly’ – is being shored up by the most excruciating comms, stupid own goals, upside-down Union Jacks, etc. I’ve seen it suggested that cringemaxxing is the winning tactic of the day, because in the crowded media marketplace gaffes go viral. This seems to be Ed Davey’s approach. The fatal flaw in this strategy is that you’re associating yourself virally with being a twit. Ed Davey is internet-famous now not for being leader of the Liberal Democrats but for being a moon-faced berk who keeps falling off things into water, like someone’s naff old dad on Total Wipeout.
Boris could pull this sort of thing off because it felt unforced, and it tapped in to a cultural archetype (not entirely accurately). Even worse, Sunak’s attempts at sass and slay merely reinforce his eager beaver vacuousness.
Despite these differences in presentation, Starmer and Sunak have so much in common. Neither seems to appreciate the huge looming threats, from racialised sectarianism to energy to housing to the baby bust, that will soon overwhelm the country.
Obviously we could have a worse choice, as we can see from a swift glance across the Atlantic. But it could, very easily, be better. Even the deputies for Sunak and Starmer, Dowden and Rayner, are at least a contrast. As it stands, being served up these two as our only options proves that something is terribly, terribly wrong.
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