Gareth Roberts

Ali G: Who Iz I? is set to hit cinema screens next month. The return of this bling-bedecked denizen of the West Staines Massive, first seen on TV in 1998, is a disquieting symptom of our century’s static culture. Back in 1998, it would have been inconceivable for the big new comedy film to have been a revival of TV characters from 1971 – On The Buses or The Liver Birds. Today, along with Ali G, we are also blessed by Alan Partridge and Have I Got News For You, even older comedy institutions. And there are endless reiterations of old shows and formats: Star Trek, Spiderman and similar, Blankety Blank, Bergerac. Mass culture has essentially stopped.

The economic storm clouds continue to gather over Britain. A reckoning of some sort is on its way, possibly a spectacular one. How will we react? Perhaps there are clues to be found in ‘I’m Backing Britain’, the short-lived campaign to gee up the nation back in early 1968. I was born a few months after its brief but memorable moment in the sun; I picked up on the slogan as a child, as one of those things adults said with a wry grin that I didn’t quite understand. But what Britain had in 1968 was a dynamic mass popular culture offering multiple pleasant distractions and more functional institutions.

Do political faces have a ‘use by’ date? Is there a point beyond which even the mugs of politicians that we like start to grate? The recent mini-media hubbub about Nigel Farage’s continuing prominence in British politics has me pondering. Is the time limit on political careers down a lot more to familiarity than anything else? It used to be a pretty accurate rule that certain occupations were flash-in-the-pan affairs. It was rare, for example, for a pop star to remain a big sensation for very long. Even the biggest stars only had about five years tops before their shine wore off and something younger, brighter and shinier turned up. In the same way, hit TV shows would blaze away for a while, and then other shows would take their places. Disposability was a given.

What a strange summer this has turned out to be: no rain and no politics. As we enter what the broadcast media are calling the fifth ‘heatwave’ of the year – a heatwave is what used to be known as a hot day or two – the green, green grass has become yellowy stubble. And the sphere of public life is similarly arid and uncanny. While it’s usual for the party political world to take a breather in the summer months, the unique circumstances of the switch of prime minister just before the rain stopped falling has given summer 2026 a spooky quality. It feels like we’re all in a dream world. And nobody is further in that dream than Andy Burnham, insulated as he is from the usual processes of scrutiny.

A change is as good as a rest, they say. Like many such maxims, this is an insightful observation worn down by overuse. It first appeared in 1857 as both the title and catch of an anonymous poem. But the wisdom of this piece of Victorian doggerel has been demonstrated over the week since Andy Burnham’s coronation. Labour has overtaken Reform in The Spectator’s poll tracker for the first time in almost two years. It’s a very slight lead, well within the margin of error, and varying across the polls, but it’s definitely there. ‘Labour’s comms has been in another league this week compared to what went before.

It can be hard sometimes to understand the progressive mind. The new Prime Minister’s first speech yesterday was intended to show that he is going to ‘do politics differently’. The first sign of this was his dispensing with the lectern used on such occasions for the last few years. Was this innocent object really the problem with his string of short-lived predecessors? I can’t imagine Liz Truss sat watching at home kicking herself, muttering ‘of course! If only I’d junked that lectern’. We hear a lot today about how people live in political echo chambers. But it is better to live with echoes of reality than echoes of fantasy The problem for Andy Burnham is bigger than that.

We’re in the middle of an ‘orderly transition’ of power from Keir Starmer to whoever might just possibly take over from him – it’s anybody’s guess – as prime minister. Many were worried that this would leave the government in policy paralysis, unable to commit to anything. If only. It turns out that the hard-won freedoms of the British people are to be ended not by legions of brutes rolling down Regent Street in tanks, but by a gaggle of gormless supply teachers Because both Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and Deputy Leader Lucy Powell – close allies of Andy Burnham – are confidently mooting new ideas.

Andy Burnham used his big speech this week to unveil his spiffing new idea to solve all the country’s terrible problems: moving its head office somewhere slightly different. This he calls ‘place-based collaboration’. Apparently, all the collaboration we’ve been doing up till now has not been place-based, and has presumably been in a mysterious, spooky void outside the normal realm of space and time. I wish politicians would can this talk of collaboration and playing nicely. If anything, politics should be more confrontational But along the way, he also found time to inform us how he intends to ‘reach out to other political parties, to find as much common ground as we can and build that more collaborative approach.

Whether it’s competition or coronation this summer, expect to hear a lot about ‘Labour values’ before (and after) Andy Burnham becomes prime minister. Labour can’t stop telling us about their wonderful values. ‘When we rally around Labour values together, our movement changes the lives of those who need it most,' Keir Starmer intoned like an adenoidal android during the local election campaign. What exactly are ‘Labour values’? Late-era Starmer could get quite emotional – as far as he was able to – about them, stating, ‘We're on the side of communities across our country,' whatever that means. In his resignation statement, he told us how he’d been ‘building a country where everyone is seen, everyone is valued’.

The BBC has binned its planned Doctor Who Christmas special and put the show ‘out to tender’. This is a face-saving TV industry term for saying you’ve kicked an ailing show into the longest of grass, but don’t want to enrage its most rabid fans. Good luck with that, chaps. Essentially it translates as ‘Somebody please, please take this nightmare off our hands’. It's like one of those Facebook ads you see for a dog that needs rehousing because it barks all night, gnaws on toddlers, and has no control of its bowels, but is a total sweetie, honestly. I’d put Doctor Who on ice for at least a decade If by some bizarre quirk of circumstance I found myself the unwilling owner of the tender, I’d put Doctor Who on ice for at least a decade.

Keir Starmer, spooked by Andy Burnham, apparently wants to leave a legacy, in much the same way that a herd of buffalo, scenting a lion, leave a legacy on the prairie. The Prime Minister has settled on banning children from social media, and possibly also installing some yet-to-be-invented software that will prevent under-16s from viewing porn or taking and sending photos of their naked bodies. Childrens’s Commissioner Rachel de Souza has further mooted extending these provisions to include 16 and 17-year-olds. Labour is planning to give 16-year-olds the vote, while simultaneously forbidding them to scroll through Instagram So, Labour is planning to give 16-year-olds the vote, while simultaneously forbidding them to scroll through Instagram.

Let's leave aside for one moment Nicola Sturgeon’s claim of ingenuous innocence in the matter of her husband Peter Murrell’s splurging sprees – because apparently this savvy, forensically-minded stickler of a woman, the foremost politician of our age, is a ditzy scatterbrain on this one issue alone. There is a particular item on the long shopping list sticks out. This, for once, was not a luxury item, something that could be hidden from timorous wee Nicola’s view in the secret chamber of that Bluebeard’s Palace in the Glaswegian suburb of Uddingston. Court records revealed that on 7 March 2020, shortly before the first Covid lockdown, Mr Murrell bought 108 ‘luxury’ Andrex toilet rolls at a cost of £55.98.

It’s striking how very swiftly we’ve accepted an event so mightily strange as the Makerfield by-election. After a couple of days of marvelling at the spectacle – a politician aiming to get back into Parliament for the express purpose of unseating his party leader – the media started treating the farrago like a totally normal event, and switched from boggling at the weirdness of it all to doing all the usual by-election stuff. Getting aerated about random polls, digging up the candidates’ salty old tweets, hanging about in pubs chatting to locals, etc. The novelty of the thing has evaporated.

The outcome of the Prime Minister’s make-or-break speech yesterday morning was never really in any doubt, was it? It’s break. Did anybody except Keir Starmer himself think it could possibly win the nation over? He is, after all, one of the weakest of the country’s public speakers, whose attempts at warmth, sincerity and human feeling lack the easy bonhomie of a supermarket self-checkout. Keir’s speech merely reinforced all his bad qualities, reminding us of his unique ability to make our blood boil while simultaneously boring us to tears. Yes, Burnham is more likeable than Keir Starmer, and seems more like a human being – but then, so is Davros In such dire circumstances, it is natural and understandable that Labour would start to think longingly of alternatives.

Reform in No. 10? As the prospect gets more likely, the hand-wringing gets more theatrical. Should Reform somehow form the next government, we are told, Britain will descend into a dystopian ‘far-right’ nightmare of book-burnings, jackboots and midnight raids. Heavy words are thrown about very lightly: fascist, authoritarian, and my new favourite ‘post-democratic’. The real problem is not this name-calling. It is the scale of what Reform would have to do, just to shepherd the country back to its relatively sane status of 1996 This is, of course, nonsense. With Farage as PM, the world will not end. Britain will not become some kind of Fourth Reich.

It is a part of the human lot that we lug about feelings of doubt, regret and guilt. We carry our sins about like suitcases. Well, okay, maybe not quite all of us. Contrary to both scripture and psychology, there are people who struggle under a quite different burden – the sheer moral goodness of their spotless souls. I’m talking, of course, about Labour MPs. The insufferable moral superiority of Labour – and indeed many progressives of all stripes – can be very hard to digest for the vast remainder of flawed humanity. The shining ethical beacon that is Keir Starmer is almost too bright to behold with the mortal eye.

Mind your language! There has recently been another smattering of incidents featuring accusations of inappropriate choice of words, or even just the wrong tone. I think it’s worth taking a closer look at some of these for what they reveal about our hang-ups, the tender areas of our discourse. What makes us wince? What is considered appropriate, and what isn’t? On last week’s Edition podcast, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams spoke of there being something ‘demonic’ about the current political culture of the US. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s ‘rhetoric about the violent obliteration of enemies’ strikes him as ‘diabolical’ – and of course Trump’s recent threat that ‘an entire civilisation will end’ (it didn’t).