As the three-word headline, ‘STARMER BLOCKS BURNHAM’ smashed on to our phone screens on Saturday, I felt I could almost hear the gleeful communal roar across the country; the same kind of Mexican wave of delight that passes through a school canteen when a dinner lady drops a big tray of puddings, a heap of custard and crockery.
Labour wars always bring good cheer. In rotten times we have to get our pleasures where we can. In this particular case, any outcome would have been a banter-facilitating outcome. If Starmer had permitted Burnham to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election, the reaction would have been similar: here we go, here we go, here we go.
I think politicians are quite wrong when they say that the public doesn’t like internecine party strife
I think politicians are quite wrong when they say that the public doesn’t like internecine party strife. Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander, for example, told Sky. ‘There would have been three months of psychodrama. Who’s up, who’s down, who’s getting on with who, who’s standing against who … Would that have been in the best interest of the Labour party? Honestly I don’t think it would have’.
We keep hearing that the public are sick of ‘psychodrama’. But no. I suspect what the public are sick of is the rape gangs, anti-Semitism, uncontrolled immigration, sectarian policing, net zero and the highest energy prices in the world, inflation and economic stasis, the cancelling of awkward elections, transgenderism, the government genuflecting to China, cultural malaise, the corruption and decay of the institutions and the Passchendaele conditions in their local A&E.
But psychodrama? It is at least fun (though I’m not quite sure what the difference is between psychodrama and good old-fashioned plain, original flavour drama). And watching Starmer squirm is decidedly pleasurable. It’s the only pleasure, in fact, that he provides.
‘Psychodrama’ is a common factor in the enjoyment of all public pastimes. I’m not a football fan but as an onlooker of those who are, it occurs to me that much of the fun they take derives less from the brief intervals of their team kicking about on Saturdays, and more from endless clamouring to sack the manager.
It’s the same with politics. We get through prime ministers at a rate of knots nowadays. Are the PMs we’ve had since Blair really so bad that this high rate of turnover was justified? Or could it be that Britain is ungovernable now mainly because, thanks to the fracturing of the entertainment world by technology, we no longer have anything else to all join in with? At one point we all knew what was going on in Eastenders or who was number one in the charts. But even the Beckhams are floundering to hold our attention now, and The Traitors is aired too infrequently to distract us. Politics is the last big show in town.
And Labour are the stars of the show. Even with all the Jenrick and Braverman stuff kicking off on the right, the Tories cannot compete. It fits the self-image of the right for them to be at each others throats; left-wing wars are extra fun because they come with added dollops of hand-wringing and self-righteousness.
Andy Burnham’s delightfully pompous statement putting himself forward as a candidate in Gorton, for example, was laced with dolorous sententiousness. ‘Manchester inspires because it is a place that has always stood for the equality of all people, right back to the cotton workers of 1862 who refused to handle slave-picked cotton’ he tells us, like a windy vicar. ‘And yet, there is now a direct threat to everything Greater Manchester has always been about, from a brand of politics which seeks to pit people against each other. It brings with it a poison we should not let enter our city-region.’ (Incidentally, why does he keep using the strange term ‘city-region’? It sounds like something Chairman Mao would’ve come out with.)
He doesn’t lower himself to name Reform, but the party is apparently against everything Manchester (and presumably Paddington Bear) has ever stood for. It’s always a joy to be lectured on ‘values’ from that lofty hillock of the moral high ground occupied by people who tried to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.
There followed Burnham’s fabulously prissy tweets responding to the news of his blocking by the NEC. This thread came with an additional salty PS about ‘the way the Labour party is being run these days. You would think that over 30 years of service would count for something but sadly not’. This was rather like the passive-aggressive last word in a family WhatsApp barney, the kind that threatens to reignite the whole spat, and causes the formation of sub-chats with people saying things like, ‘leave it, Sally, it’s just Dad’s way’.
We can now add the Burnham row to the other internecine chuckles provided over the years by Labour. Eric Heffer and Tony Benn trying to dethrone Kinnock. Hewitt and Hoon’s botched secret plan to take down Gordon Brown. Hazel Blears ‘rocking the boat’…
If we are saddled with Labour, let them entertain us with their psychodramatic squabbles. It’s the very least they can do.
Comments