Gareth Roberts

Keir Starmer is unpopular. You may have noticed this from his record-breakingly low approval ratings. The weekend just gone brought pungent public confirmation: booing at the mention of his name at the Royal Variety performance at the Albert Hall and a spirited chant among the crowd at the World Darts Championship at Alexandra Palace, which threw an accusation of onanism on to the critical palette. This is not a new phenomenon. You will remember that George Osborne was booed at the Olympics. And older readers will recall that Margaret Thatcher’s name was greeted with hisses and rumbles even in politer times. But above the street level, in the broad flow of our popular culture, where is the outrage? There is much to be outraged about, as if you need reminding.

Rewatching the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express the other night, I was struck by the incredible organisational skills of Mrs Harriet Hubbard, played by Lauren Bacall. (Spoilers on the line ahead). Mrs Hubbard assembles an extremely disparate team of 12 potential killers with a grudge against the victim, books them all on a transcontinental train crossing where they all pretend not to know each other, and orchestrates a stabbing party, a dodeca-murder – improvising wildly as she goes because of the sheer last-minute bad luck of Hercule Poirot being berthed right next door to the scene of the crime. How did she go about coordinating this scenario, I wondered? Was there a WhatsApp group? In real life, much less complex plots have a habit of leaking or hitting snags.

Kemi Badenoch has some thoughts on the Labour party. When pressed by the Telegraph on who or what would come after Rachel Reeves in the terrible event of her being defenestrated, the Tory leader mused: ‘They [Labour] are going to go through lots of different cycles of Labour MPs, some of whom are very similar to the ones that have gone to the Jeremy Corbyn party. You see what a rabble they are. Labour are actually not that much different.’ The thing that really unites the Your Party nuts and Labour MPs is their sanctimony Is that fair? Like many, my weekend was considerably enlivened by highlights from the livestream of the inaugural Your Party conference. This has been dubbed ‘comedy gold’ and ‘better than Netflix’. It was certainly surreal and sad.

After its Gotterdämerung week, capped by the ‘sorry not sorry’ resignations of Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, it didn’t take long for the BBC and its supporters to start flinging mud. You are political; we are not. We are only being nice; you have mounted a ‘right-wing coup’. I’m trying to imagine what a Daily Telegraph coup would look like – Janet Daley rolling in atop a T-54 tank, Charles Moore installed as El Presidente. You might think that reacting to Michael Prescott’s internal report sooner might’ve been a better idea for Tim Davie than doing nothing much and hoping it wouldn’t leak; that ‘I’ll put this fizzing stick of dynamite in my bottom drawer for six months and cross fingers it won’t go off’ was an unwise strategy. But that isn’t the BBC way.

What imaginary country does Labour's new deputy leader, Lucy Powell, live in? When Powell was crowned as the official thorn-in-the-side of Keir Starmer – as if he needed one – this weekend, she painted a picture of a Britain frustrated at the slow pace of change that Labour is delivering. It's always enjoyable hearing about the place that senior Labour politicians think they inhabit ‘Division and hate are on the rise,’ she said. 'Discontent and disillusionment widespread. The desire for change, impatient and palpable. People are looking around, looking elsewhere for the answers … we have to offer hope, to offer the big change the country is crying out for. We must give a stronger sense of our purpose, whose side we are on, and of our Labour values and beliefs.

What do the following things have in common? The ‘Safety Advisory Group’ of Birmingham City Council banning the sale of away tickets to fans of an Israeli football team. The refusal of police to arrest ‘pro-Palestinian’ marchers calling to ‘globalise the intifada’ right in front of them. The reluctance of politicians to implement the law on separation of the sexes, made clear months ago by the Supreme Court ruling. The government’s unwillingness to protect parliament from Chinese spying. I think the answer is simple: plain, old-fashioned fear. Yes, we often hear accusations that the institutions are squeamish about difficult topics, that individuals are guilty of moral cowardice.

The Greens are having quite a moment. Since the anointing of Zack Polanski as leader of the party, there’s been a 45 per cent increase in the membership, which is now up to about a hundred thousand believers. The party is also doing very well, comparatively speaking, in opinion polling, reaching about 15 per cent, not very far behind the Tories. The Polanski surge has come courtesy of a Corbyn-esque policy blitz But while the Greens are keen to talk up their polling success and growing membership – which is, naturally, good for party coffers – it won’t necessarily correlate to wider electoral success. We’ve been here before: during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour, the membership peaked at a modern high of about half a million. And we know how that ended.

The G-A-Y Bar in Soho’s Old Compton Street is to close for good this weekend. It opened in the mid-1990s, spinning off from the Saturday club night of the same name at the nearby Astoria (itself long gone, thanks to Crossrail). Entrepreneur Jeremy Joseph, who has run the ‘brand’ since its inception, posted the news on Instagram: ‘Old Compton Street has been my home and my work. When I opened G-A-Y Bar, it was to be one of the safest and most proudly LGBT streets – a place where you could be who you are and feel safe. For me, Old Compton Street has lost that LGBT identity. Old Compton Street wasn’t just a street, it was a community together as one. But sadly that’s not Old Compton Street anymore.

The Labour conference, given the government’s current levels of popularity – somewhere about the same rung occupied by, say, galloping dysentery or Huw Edwards – was always going to be a macabre spectacle. But there’s an aspect to this Grand Guignol that I wasn’t expecting; the unpleasant sight of various members of the cabinet vying, in their addresses, to show who can wave the flag with the greatest gusto. We’ve had Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper railing against Reform, describing them as ‘plastic patriots’ We’ve had Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper railing against Reform, describing them as ‘plastic patriots’. Housing Secretary Steve Reed is trying to reinvent himself as a likely lad, full of laughs.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a peculiar phenomenon has re-emerged: the casket caveat. Instead of simply condemning the dreadful murder of a young man, many eulogies to Kirk are laced with qualifications. Clods of faint praise scattered over a fresh grave. ‘It’s regrettable that he was shot, no matter how much of a bastard he was,’ is the sentiment – or ‘We gather in solemn remembrance of a man who, though admired by many, really had it coming.’ A piece on Kirk's murder, under the pseudonym ‘Lady Liberty’, drips with insinuations Such weasel words have proliferated since Kirk’s murder, often tarted up as balanced commentary, but reeking of bad faith. Nowhere is this attitude more evident than in the latest issue of Private Eye.

There’s a certain thrill in saying, ‘I told you so.’ We all relish the moment when our warnings are vindicated, when the world finally catches up with our foresight. But this time, I genuinely take no pleasure in it. I said Britain would begin to crack, and now it is.  I’m exhausted by those who, years later, grudgingly admit that I was right. I’d much rather be mocked for overreacting, my words dismissed with a snarky ‘this aged well’. At least then, the worst wouldn’t have come to pass. The recent Unite the Kingdom demonstration, led by Tommy Robinson, brought this into sharp focus. Figures like Laurence Fox and Katie Hopkins, who you might consider to be gobshites, addressed the huge crowd.

They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but I have a better serving suggestion. How about revenge plated up simmering, every single day, again and again, inescapable and eternal? For surely that is the intended outcome of Emily Thornberry’s plan to – maybe, possibly – run for the position of deputy leader of the Labour party. Even that ‘possibly’ caveat has the air of somebody turning the knife. How she must delight in dangling this ‘I might, I might not’ eventuality before Keir Starmer. Because it was Starmer, after all, who stabbed her in the front after the 2024 election, chucking her unceremoniously out from her shadow position of attorney-general and handing this plum job to his old chum Lord Hermer.