I wish I’d invested in lecterns back in the day. They have become a fixture of British politics of late, a symbol of the chaos and incompetence that has marked our government for some time. Every time our leaders fall short, the podium is wheeled out and a ‘reset’ or resignation is announced and the whole cycle of malice and incompetence begins again. Good for the lectern producers, exhausting for the rest of us.
Starmer’s podium is a white plastic number, a little like an upside-down bathroom bin. It appeared not outside Downing Street but in an anonymous room with some wonky Labour branding in it. Here – in a suitably Wernham Hogg like setting – Starmer was going to ‘make the speech of his political life’ or, we might add, death.
Despite a leadership challenge from Skippy the Kangaroo, the mysteriously antipodean MP for Wood Green Catherine West, it soon became clear that Starmer was here to fight on. He was introduced by an identikit Red Wall MP whose face we will next see in a northern leisure centre at 3 a.m. as the returning officer announces that she’s lost her deposit. The Labour party, she said, ‘is one of the greatest vehicles for changing the lives of working people this country has ever known’. Few people would now disagree with that, but they might quibble on whether those lives have been changed, especially in recent years, for the better.
There was lots of cheering and whooping for the PM but then there was for Louis XVI on the Place de la Concorde. He began by addressing the catastrophic losses of the local elections: ‘I get it, I feel it’ he said. One of Sir Keir’s problems is that he oozes insincerity. There are teenagers whose sarcastic answering back sounds more authentic and plausible than the PM expressing solidarity.
His natural insincerity wasn’t helped by the absurdity of some of his statements given the reality of the situation. Justifying why he wouldn’t resign he said that ‘A Labour government would never be forgiven for inflicting chaos on this country’. Which is a bit like saying, amid a cloud of hoof-produced dust, that he’d never be forgiven for leaving the stable door open.
‘I know I have my doubters,’ Starmer said with almost comic understatement, but as if it was some moment of profound self-knowledge. ‘I know I’m not great with children,’ says King Herod. ‘Personal finance isn’t my strong suit,’ says Al Capone. There were the usual meaningless phrases too: ‘Incremental change won’t cut it,’ he gargled in that weird fleshy cluck that he produces from somewhere in his adenoids.
Perhaps the unintentionally funniest moment was when, in explaining why people voted for the Greens and Reform, he said that ‘Stories beat spreadsheets’, which is especially funny when coming from a man who – were a spreadsheet to become animate via some sort of ancient curse embedded into Microsoft Excel – would be easily mistaken for said cursed enfleshment of mindless statistics.
In an attempt to justify his continued toad-like squatting in No. 10, he listed things that were just demonstrably not true; that the economy was sound and that he’d ‘got the big political choices right’. If he was going to base his case for remaining as prime minister on such obvious falsehoods one can’t help but think he should have just gone the whole hog and claimed that he could summon clouds made of candyfloss and increase the sexual prowess of all British homeowners.
The question many MPs were asking going into the speech was ‘does he get it?’. ‘It’ being the realisation which many of them got from the doorstep that Labour is now as popular as Prince Andrew with the hantavirus as a plus one. He got so close. About voters he said, ‘I’m not sure they believe that we care’– and what would it be about the last two years of prioritising vindictive politicised legislation, targeting peers, farmers and schoolchildren, that might have given them that impression? ‘The status quo does not work!’ he kept shouting, with what his handlers had presumably told him passed for passion.
The penny was dropping, but Starmer’s response seemed to be to pick it up
The penny was dropping, but Starmer’s response seemed to be to pick it up and pocket it. According to Starmer the ‘status quo’ is apparently represented by vague unfairness in sick pay five years ago rather than by a lawyer obsessed with undermining British institutions, overseeing a stagnant economy and presiding over record channel migrant crossings.
Nowhere was this clearer than when he listed what he intended to do about it all. Apparently one of his solutions to seeing off the Farage surge is pivoting towards the EU. It seems that nothing has been learned at all. The speech was the same old slop from his party conference, delivered faster and louder. From his telling of ‘stories of hope’ to the ‘everyday heroes’ he invoked, like the people who removed racist graffiti from walls (he didn’t even explain the context of this, just assumed listeners would know), it was just more of what had been churned out – and not worked – for the last two years.
Starmer claimed that he was going to deliver ‘urgent government on the side of working people’. I actually don’t know whether Starmer truly believes that he represents this or whether he just throws out words that sound like the sort of thing his voters might like, and hopes they’ll be duped by it.
Actually, it doesn’t matter if he believes it. It matters if his MPs do – or, even if they don’t, that they think the alternative to these re-microwaved platitudes is even worse. There are those who wonder why there is such glee at Starmer’s downfall. The rank hypocrisy of a man who assured people that his premiership would lead to an end of these embarrassing reset moments now has had to make more of them than anyone else – and all as a result of his vanity, vindictiveness and incompetence. The only people who will be truly happy with his speech today are the ones who so wisely invested in podiums.
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