Stephen Robinson

You only realise how depressing it has become to live in Keir Starmer’s Britain when you land in Cape Town towards the end of an interminable northern winter. Your mood immediately lifts – and it’s not only because of the warm ocean air or the diamond sky above Table Mountain. There is a contented buzz about the place.  Take your seat in a bar or restaurant in one of the coastal suburbs spread out around either side of the Cape peninsula, and the mood is upbeat and relaxed. The multi-racial staff are young and cheerful, diligently going about their business. No one is grumbling about the price of energy. The proprietor won’t be telling you how he is having to lay off half the waiting staff because of Rachel Reeves’s National Insurance raid.

Keir Starmer used to be our MP and I have always had a soft spot for the blinking dafty ever since I wrote to him at the height of the antisemitic triumphalism of the Corbyn era. I warned him of the strength of feeling in our corner of north London, and suggested he be careful if he planned to come canvassing down our mews. Our elderly Jewish neighbour, like Starmer a keen Arsenal man, had put me on standby to run any Labour activists up the hill to Royal Free A&E should they take their chances by knocking on his front-door. Pretty much everything is going the way of Labour’s new intake of mulish left-wing backbenchers To his credit, Starmer replied to my email with more than boilerplate.

A few months before he died in 2007, Bill Deedes asked if I would come to see him at his home in Kent and bring Boris Johnson along with me. I was writing a biography of Bill at the time, and I knew he was miserable because he had broken his hip and could no longer come up to London. Boris jumped at the idea and I remember our lunch as the last time I saw Bill exuberantly happy. Boris knew instinctively what a 93-year-old journalist who was struggling to write his weekly column needed, and filled him in hilariously on the London political and media gossip. The only slight awkwardness came when Bill stressed his admiration for David Cameron, and Boris’s impenetrable eyes momentarily turned just a little beady.

It can be cruel, the way politics plays out. At the very moment George Osborne was telling the bemused staff of the London Evening Standard  that his working life in politics had obscured a passionate desire to become a newspaper editor, a familiar figure could be seen in the fresh meat department of the Whole Foods supermarket almost directly underneath the paper’s Kensington newsroom. That man was David Cameron, and inevitably someone with journalistic instincts spotted him, snapped him on her phone, and tweeted it. We congratulate ourselves on the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ nature of British politics.

A few months before he died in 2007, Bill Deedes asked if I would come to see him at his home in Kent and bring Boris Johnson along with me. I was writing a biography of Bill at the time, and I knew he was miserable because he had broken his hip and could no longer come up to London. Boris jumped at the idea and I remember our lunch as the last time I saw Bill exuberantly happy. Boris knew instinctively what a 93-year-old journalist who was struggling to write his weekly column needed, and filled him in hilariously on the London political and media gossip. The only slight awkwardness came when Bill stressed his admiration for David Cameron, and Boris’s impenetrable eyes momentarily turned just a little beady.

This article originally appeared in the Spectator in March. It is being reposted on Coffee House after the former Prime Minister was pictured letting his hair down at a festival It can be cruel, the way politics plays out. At the very moment George Osborne was telling the bemused staff of the London Evening Standard last week that his working life in politics had obscured a passionate desire to become a newspaper editor, a familiar figure could be seen in the fresh meat department of the Whole Foods supermarket almost directly underneath the paper’s Kensington newsroom. That man was David Cameron, and inevitably someone with journalistic instincts spotted him, snapped him on her phone, and tweeted it.

It can be cruel, the way politics plays out. At the very moment George Osborne was telling the bemused staff of the London Evening Standard last week that his working life in politics had obscured a passionate desire to become a newspaper editor, a familiar figure could be seen in the fresh meat department of the Whole Foods supermarket almost directly underneath the paper’s Kensington newsroom. That man was David Cameron, and inevitably someone with journalistic instincts spotted him, snapped him on her phone, and tweeted it. Stephen Robinson and James Forsyth discuss Cameron and Osborne's diverging retirement plans: We congratulate ourselves on the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ nature of British politics.

Zac Goldsmith has spent much of the past few weeks telling us that the London mayoral vote 'will be very close'. But it wasn't, in the end: he lost by a fairly large margin. Some political campaigns are failures; others are simply tragedies, and Zac Goldsmith’s falls into the latter category. As I found out when I spent some time on the campaign trail with him. The candidate himself is an amiable enough soul, though his thin CV and past business failures scarcely qualify him to stand up as the candidate of enterprise against what he classes as the ‘divisive’ figure of Sadiq Khan.

Zac Goldsmith spent almost every day out on the stump during his London mayoral campaign dressed in the formal dark suit he inherited from his father, and had recut on his death in 1997. At least that is what a member of his team told me as I was out observing proceedings one day. I think that detail was offered as a bit of journalistic ‘colour’ to show Zac’s sense of filial duty, but that was the only sense in which his painfully understated campaigning could be said to have owed anything to Sir James Goldsmith’s bombastic, manic style when he ran the Referendum party. Some political campaigns are failures; others are simply tragedies, and Zac Goldsmith’s falls into the latter category.