Downing Street’s briefing room increasingly looks like a municipal crematorium. It is a depressing feast of cheap teak and black edges. Other countries announce major foreign policy decisions in front of reminders of their glorious past or signs of their present strength. President Macron recently gave a speech in front of a nuclear submarine. Sir Keir gave today’s looking like he was about to announce a non-denominationally specific period of quiet reflection whilst someone played a MIDI file of ‘Time to Say Goodbye’. The crematorium analogy of course invites a subsequent question: is he the undertaker or is he the corpse? One suspects a bit of both.
When it comes to the government’s ongoing Noncepocalypse, from which the war in the Gulf is doubtless a welcome distraction, claiming ‘due process’ was followed actually rather exacerbates the issue
In fairness to Sir Keir, he hadn’t actually come to this intensely depressing environment to make any major foreign policy announcements, merely continuation of the same. He has been acting in recent weeks as if his panicked scrabbling for a policy on Iran was actually some piece of great Bismarckian cunning. Even a clock smashed to pieces on the top of a skip might, if the wind blows its mangled hands over the remnants of its face, still contrive to be right twice a day.
Foreign policy decisions ‘would be based’, he told us, ‘on a calm level-headed assessment of the British national interest.’ I bet whoever was behind the Chagos betrayal or continued shrinking of the armed forces or greenlighting the China Spy Embassy will be feeling pretty stupid when they hear this. Oh wait.
Despite his posturing as a latter-day Talleyrand, policy wise, the PM is actually like a rabbit which freezes in headlights and, when the approaching car swerves and crashes, gives itself a pat on the back for standing up so nobly to a roadway aggressor. Inevitably, his Global StatesmanTM demeanour couldn’t last long. Sir Keir couldn’t resist making comments about the Tories. Apparently, the real crisis is that ‘those who resist the push for clean energy’ won over the last government. That’ll be news to President Trump, the Shah in exile and whoever is ayatollah this week. He continued the grandstanding: ‘it’s moments like this that tell you what a government is about’, he puffed. Quite.
Unfortunately for him, the press that he’d assembled to hear his triumph song, actually weren’t that interested. They wanted to ask about, annoyingly, energy bills and, even more annoyingly, Lord Mandelson. This rankled.
Robert Peston, centrism’s comedy-voiced scarecrow, evoked the image of Mandy in his dressing gown with the former Duke of York and Jeffrey Epstein. He also pointed out that the incredibly talented, better liked and non-paedo-adjacent Dame Karen Pierce was happy to stay in post. ‘Err, let me talk about the Strait of Hormuz’ garbled Sir Keir, whilst doing one of his strange hand gestures. The gesture in question involves him extending his left hand out and opening and closing it in an appeal for calm and reason to prevail. Unfortunately for him, given the subject matter, it also looks a bit like he’s groping the chest of a pubescent ghost.
Beth Rigby quoted the government’s own national security advisor who referred to the vetting of the appointment as ‘Weirdly rushed’. Shot was followed up with chaser; ‘Is it therefore possible that you misled parliament?’
‘The process was followed,’ barked Sir Keir. He proceeded to basically say the same thing over and over again using his limited lawyerly vocabulary.
When it comes to the government’s ongoing Noncepocalypse, from which the war in the Gulf is doubtless a welcome distraction, claiming ‘due process’ was followed actually rather exacerbates the issue. Sir Keir increasingly resembles the ghost of Captain Smith glubbing away at the bottom of the Atlantic that actually the evacuation drill was followed to a T.
Ideological blindness about ‘their side’ led the government to conduct a Potemkin vetting process, and even with blatantly inappropriate candidates and several well-informed voices warning against it, they still ended up with the conclusion they wanted. That’s rather the point of the post-Blair managerial state I suppose.
Let’s hope that Sir Keir might be the unwilling and accidental undertaker to that system and its vice-like grip on policy, procedure and the institutions, before it ends up turning the British nation-state into a corpse.
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