When I first saw the headline I was highly optimistic. Sir Keir Starmer had identified the threat to society posed by ‘young men in their bedrooms’. What would follow, surely, must be a polemic in the style of Robert Baden-Powell or John Harvey Kellogg on the dangers of masturbation.
It’s about time this was politicised, I reckoned – the terrible sapping of a young man’s strength and soul by the indiscriminate spillage of his precious bodily fluids. Perhaps Sir Keir would demand that parents order their wayward teenage offspring to put down the Kleenex, open the bedroom door, come downstairs and either eat a bowl of nutritious cornflakes or join the Boy Scouts. This is the sort of policy which might get a little bit of cut-through and I could hear, in my head, Sir Keir addressing next year’s party conference: ‘Let me be very clear. We, as a government, will not tolerate monkey-spanking. No More Monkey-Spanking!’
But I read on and sadly this was not what he meant. He was not trying to stop ‘young men’ from grilling the tiger – he wanted to stop them murdering people in terrorist attacks and he had identified the fact that what the perpetrators had in common was that they were often alone, isolated in their bedrooms. So are bedrooms implicated in these barbaric outrages? That was the thing Sir Keir homed in on.
Perhaps he is right. There has been a trend in the past 20 years for bedrooms to be painted, rather than decorated with wallpaper. I have always held that wallpaper inculcates a calming, civilising temperament. Perhaps that is why Fusilier Lee Rigby was hacked to death in 2013, and why 22 young people were killed at the Manchester Arena in 2017, and why those three little girls – Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar and Bebe King – were knifed to death by Axel Rudakubana in Southport last year.
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