Sam Leith

Still making headlines, it seems, is one of the more trivial scandals to have dogged the Labour government in its first 100 days in office: to wit, the police protection given to the pop singer Taylor Swift. File firmly under circuses, you might think, rather than bread. For those who need catching up, the American pop star was given a VVIP police escort around London during the UK leg of her Eras tour – a swishy blue-light motorcade of the sort usually reserved for members of the royal family and foreign heads of state, and the reassuring knowledge that should some loon seek to lob a brick at her, or worse, Tay-Tay could rely on London’s finest to pile in with their side-handled batons and/or firearms.

‘Could you write a piece,’ my colleague wondered aloud, ‘saying come back Jeremy Corbyn: all is forgiven?’ Ha ha ha, said I. No. We most certainly are not there yet. And it is hard to conceive of any sequence of events, up to and including an asteroid strike on SW1 or a Day of the Triffids style mass blinding, which would leave us thinking that a return of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership would be a step in the right direction.  And yet and yet. Keir Starmer has been squandering at quite startling speed the goodwill of those of us (I know that will not be all Spectator readers) who had some goodwill towards him in the first place. The resignation of Sue Gray will be spun, no doubt, as Sir Keir showing ‘grip’ and ‘steel’.

The standout line from Sir Keir Starmer’s first speech to conference as prime minister – the one that will be quoted far and wide – will not have been what he planned. With his most serious, most pained expression, Sir Keir called for 'an immediate ceasefire in Gaza' and... 'the return of the sausages'. He corrected himself immediately, of course – he meant to say hostages – but at that point he was (forgive me) cooked.   While the faces of his front bench colleagues were effortfully composed in the hopes of pretending that their leader hadn’t just said what he just said, you know that their minds were feverishly imagining what the photoshop guys and pun technicians were going to do with that for tomorrow morning’s red-tops. Anyone can make a slip of the tongue.

Introducing a tub-thumping op-ed in the Mail yesterday, Robert Jenrick quoted Orwell: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’ Mr Jenrick’s thesis is a familiar one. It is that ‘England’s political and media elite’ (he didn’t get ‘metropolitan establishment’ in the text but it was supplied in the headline) ‘seem to actively disapprove’ of their nationality, and that this will not do. ‘I can’t stomach such lofty arrogance,’ he declared, calling instead for a willingness to ‘confront complex issues of identity’ while at the same time being unreservedly ‘proud to be British.

Well, colour me disappointed. I was among those – mugs, the uncharitable will be quick to call them – who imagined that Sir Keir Starmer represented the arrival of a welcome period of dull, unshowy decency at the top of our politics. I thought that whatever else he did – disappointed the left; enraged the right; made 'hard decisions' that nobody liked – it would be a long time before he was caught making chiselling excuses for accepting freebies, or rewarding donors with favours.

I am suffering – and I hope readers will bear with me – a failure of imagination in the aftermath of the Grenfell report. Not a total failure, mind. It is all too easy to imagine how failures of regulation, of maintenance, of oversight, contributed to the Grenfell catastrophe. It’s easy to see how, here and there, and without malice, but with disastrous consequences, amid fraying budgets and overworked bureaucracies, the people and systems which should have ensured that the tenants of Grenfell Tower were safe did not. A cascading series of small failures, missed opportunities and rules honoured in the breach. That, we can all picture.