Saint Starmer has brought this all on himself

With the fearsome rhetorical skills that made him such a feared advocate, long before he was a glint in Lord Alli’s eye, Keir Starmer mobilised the English language this week, and sent it into battle. During his keynote speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, the prime minister deftly moved the national conversation on from the squalid revelations that I am insisting should be known as ‘snoutgate’, and on to the safer terrain of demanding the release of the Israeli ‘sausages’.

A slip of the tongue, of course. Easily done, and no worse than the 30 or 40 which Joe Biden committed in the week leading up to his dignified withdrawal from the visible universe. Starmer’s sausages / hostages slip-up has launched a thousand memes and groaning puns, but is the wurst of it over?

At best, the sausage gaffe only provided a brief hiatus from the endless conveyor belt of news about Labour’s overflowing goody bags. Even as I was preparing to press send on this copy, a new revelation emerged of another gift. This time, it was a stay in a luxury apartment worth £20,000, which Starmer claims he ‘needed’ in order to provide ‘somewhere quiet’ for his son to revise for his GCSEs during the General Election campaign. This was a campaign, let’s not forget, in which Starmer threatened to punish anxious middle-class parents, who don’t have wealthy donors, already breaking their backs to give their kids the best chance at a good education, with the imposition of VAT on school fees. Seriously, fuck this guy.

At some point, one has to publish, but the chances that this column will be fully up-to-date with the latest freebie scandal when it goes to press are thin.

The #FBPE crowd aside (think Supertanskiii, Marina Purkiss and their ilk), non-partisan observers admit that Labour’s has been one of the worst honeymoon periods since Jackie Gleason’s day. Having arrived in such glistening armour, under such fluttering banners of virtue, Starmer’s chargers have been standing enmired up to their girth for weeks now, all momentum lost, their moral authority a half-forgotten dream. Within a few weeks, Starmer has already moved from being known as ‘two-tier Keir’ to having an entire tier of infamy to himself, not to mention another one at the Emirates stadium.

It is grim. And he and his merry warriors, his knights of Scamalot, have brought it on themselves. They created it, with their stern moralising in opposition, and by offering so little of substance in government – a vacuum that the nature of politics abhors.

There is, as the saying goes, always a tweet. But on this occasion, Labour has got a whole chubby little toilet book full of them – featuring complaints about everything from the pay of special advisers to taxpayer-funded ‘vanity’ photographers. Every one, a sausage to fortune.

In one of the most frequently shared moments from Jerry Seinfeld’s talkshow, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Norm Macdonald dwells on the then recent revelations concerning Bill Cosby, their fellow stand-up comedian, and erstwhile stand-up guy and family man. ‘A lot of people say the worst part was the hypocrisy, but I didn’t think so’, says Norm. ‘You didn’t?’, Jerry replies. ‘No, I thought the worst part was the raping.’

But the fact is, people are enraged by inconsistency. The ‘optics’ – an ironic word, given the prime minister has been in receipt of free spectacles worth more than £2,400 – are a second-order problem. Journalists that focus on them are like derivatives dealers, trading in anticipated reactions rather than the underlying transgression. But hypocrisy is not just a matter of optics. It is a window into character and judgement.

Preposterous though the notion is of anyone paying to dress Keir Starmer – the world’s least-exciting Action Man – these donations would have been a relatively trivial embarrassment had he not spent much of the past four years launching one bitter, scathing attack after another on the Tories for doing similar. He seemed especially enraged by Boris and Carrie, whom he portrayed as a deadly combo of Imelda Marcos, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and Lady Macbeth.

Meanwhile, the larger substantive issue confronting Labour, as it hopes to make it to Christmas with even a cupful of the tide that swept it over the line in July, is the state of the public finances – a ‘black hole’ many, many orders of magnitude larger than Wembley Stadium, with or without Taylor Swift in it.

This black hole has provided yet more evidence of Starmer’s hypocrisy. Yes, some of the national debt Labour inherited from the Tories is no doubt due to incompetence – such as, the expense of Test and Trace, the abandoned sections of HS2 and the lunging lunacy of Eat Out to Help Out. But so much of it is the unavoidable collateral from measures that Labour demanded more of when in opposition.

Lockdown, furlough and the horrific loss of productivity from closing down the economy – these were all measures that Labour was disgusted to see not deployed faster, pussycat, faster, and harder, and again and again and again. Same with support for Ukraine, the dogged pursuit of Net Zero, funding for the NHS, etc.

The thing that will likely save Keir and Co from too much scrutiny over all those old demands isn’t that they weren’t in charge. It is the lack of a simple, cartoonishly amusing image to settle in the public’s mind to illustrate the hypocrisy. Keir Starmer scoffing an #FBPE-approved buffet alone in his ivory hospitality suite at the Arsenal is a much more readily available image than an avoidable but abstract loss of tax revenues, or childhood mental health. It is up there with Boris scoffing birthday cake and quaffing beers during lockdown.

When Churchill said that democracy was the worst kind of political system, apart from all the others, this is perhaps the sort of thing he was thinking of – the elevation of impertinent personal details above detailed policy analysis. But then again, Winston himself probably set the standard for accepting indefensible largesse, when he was bailed out by financier Sir Henry Strakosch, in 1938 and again in 1940. There is no indication that Sir Henry wanted, expected or got anything in particular for his money, except Churchill’s continued capacity to resist Hitler, which surely no right-thinking person could deplore. Yet in accepting that money, Churchill provided a loose thread which malign revisionists have been able to tug at profitably ever since. (Boris Johnson wrote in his 2014 Churchill biography that the great man’s ‘personal finances would not today pass the Private Eye test’.)

Still, at least Churchill’s thread dangled from a robe of incomparable magnificence in 20th-century politics. Johnson’s premiership consisted almost entirely of threads, many of them leading back not to the robes of state but of the bedchamber. And barely 10 weeks into his tenure, Keir Starmer’s dismal knee-skimming towelling effort has begun to unravel, too.

And for what? For what? The peace and quiet most of us resort to noise-cancelling headphones for, and the chance to watch footy in an executive box? Prime minister you may be, Sir Keir, but prime cut you are not – you silly, silly sausage.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.