In the film Goodbye Lenin, a German family has to convince a fussy, old woman who is also a committed socialist that everything going on outside her window is fine and dandy when, in fact, the Iron Curtain has fallen, the entire lie on which her life was built has crumbled and that this is clear to anyone who looks outside for even five minutes. I often think that this must be the closest we can get to knowing what working for Keir Starmer is like.
Sir Keir didn’t want to return to the subject, so inevitably we got yet another mention of Liz Truss
Again at Prime Minister’s Questions today, Sir Keir was determined to present a narrative of perpetual economic sunshine warming a grateful and socially coherent nation, with tractor production reaching new heights. Unfortunately his MPs’ faces revealed a different story.
Mrs Badenoch told the Prime Minister that his own backbenchers were fed up with being known as ‘The paedo-defenders party’. Cue much groaning and performative huffing, as if this wasn’t obviously and demonstrably true. There are newts with political instincts more developed than some Labour backbenchers, but even they can see that Sir Keir’s tragic habit of consistently promoting the associates of known sex criminals is not exactly helping on the doorsteps.
Mrs Badenoch might have profitably talked about this or any of the other scandals presided over by the greatest moralising Premier since Gladstone but it seemed like she actually did want to stick to her chosen topic – student loans. She told the Prime Minister to ‘Get off your high horse, stop making stupid jokes’ and return to the subject in hand. Why was it that he was determined to increase the financial burden on graduates, while ‘helping benefits street’, she tried to ask him, without much success.
Sir Keir didn’t want to return to the subject, so inevitably we got yet another mention of Liz Truss. One hopes that the inside of Sir Keir’s head is padded, given that Ms Truss seems to spend so much time there. After slagging off the Tories it was more of his North Korean style insistence that all was going well. A clash about the economy mentioned the Bank of England and Mrs Badenoch couldn’t resist drawing in the Chancellor of the Exchequer too. ‘Where she used to work’ – the Leader of the Opposition reminded her – ‘in the complaints department.’
The Chancellor immediately kicked off at this unwelcome jab; humankind cannot bear very much reality. She mouthed an unparliamentary term starting with ‘f’ and ending in ‘off’, which, ironically is what some expect her to do come May.
Sir Keir routinely accuses Mrs Badenoch of ‘talking the country down’, as if the state of things is just a morale problem. We have reached Tinkerbell, or even Monty Python black knight territory with the Prime Minister. He presumably thinks the paedos and the economy and the Channel migrant numbers and everything else in his in-tray can simply be magicked away by positive thinking: if only everyone would just get on board. This is now so far from how the country actually feels that it feels less like Goodbye Lenin and more, ‘Hello Nurse Ratched’.
Mrs Badenoch eventually snapped and tried to drag Sir Keir towards reality: ‘The defining image of his premiership won’t be breakfast clubs but the man he appointed as ambassador to the US being arrested’. I wouldn’t be so sure; with this lot there are almost certainly even more embarrassing ends in store.
There came a glimpse of a possible future reality too: the MP for Clacton was in the chamber and had a question. Sir Keir had pre-empted this with an obviously scripted demand that he apologise for a threat to a Labour MP reposted by a Reform activist. Nigel Farage ignored this and instead asked a question about the Chagos islanders. The PM wobbled in fury. He resembled a veal flavoured blancmange. Next to him, the Chancellor gave her potty mouth a break and instead sat with it performatively wide open in shock. She looked like an abandoned blow-up doll.
Of course, the Prime Minister didn’t answer; perhaps he sensed another U-turn was on the horizon. Instead, he assumed his customary ‘moralising soapbox’ position, voiced his disgust, demanded apologies, before clucking a party-political answer about the bright new future offered by the same old Labour in the Gorton and Denton by-election. He will be hoping that voters do exactly this; otherwise it might not just be Goodbye Lenin, but Goodbye Starmer as well.
Comments