Lord Geidt breaking up with Boris Johnson over steel tariffs feels like one of those stories about a woman breaking up with a notorious serial killer she has married behind bars. Killers serving life sentences are surprisingly popular on the marriage market – then again, Boris Johnson’s been surprisingly popular on the ethics adviser market. So maybe the steel thing is the politics version of getting your marriage to a homicidal sex offender annulled because he didn’t phone you on your birthday. Some things are just impossible to move past, you know? According to reports, Johnson is now toying with not having an ethics adviser at all. Maybe just staying ethics-adviser single, and learning to love himself again. It’s called personal growth, actually – look it up.
That said, you get the feeling the one person Johnson really couldn’t stand to lose is Keir Starmer. The Labour leader has had another lacklustre week, which feels almost impressive, given he’s up against a prime minister who recently received a fine from the police for breaking his own laws, took a massive pasting in a no-confidence vote from his own MPs, breaks international law like a wedding vow, and is the guy in charge as the UK barrels towards a recession in the middle of an utterly grim cost of living crisis. I know Labour is six points ahead, but hantavirus is probably six points ahead of Ebola.
On Tuesday, Starmer told his shadow cabinet to stop briefing the press that he’s boring, telling them the actual boring thing was undermining Labour. Some round the table echoed his sentiments at length, which one attender described to the Guardian as “ironically, very boring”. Meanwhile, a pollster produced a wordcloud based on focus-group comments about Starmer, which appeared to showcase the entire thesaurus entry for “dishwater”. The dominant word – yup, “boring” – was surrounded by a constellation of near-synonyms: “dull”, “bland”, “uninspiring”, “nothing”, “ineffective”, “useless”, “unsure” …
It should be said that when the same pollster ran a similar exercise with Johnson in April, the prime minister’s wordcloud ran the gamut from “liar” to “idiot”, via “incompetent”, “dishonest”, “untrustworthy”, “buffoon” and – sorry, but I can never unsee it – “fit”. (I don’t know what to tell you – maybe they were discussing how fit he was for office.)
Inevitably, some people keep talking up “boring” as a virtue. What the country really needs, they say, is a period of boring government. Mm. Probably. I mean, I really need seven consecutive early nights and to download the Headspace app. But … it’s quite boring, isn’t it? So much so that I can already tell it’s not going to happen.
Anyway, as my diagnostic fave, Dr Gregory House, knew: people lie. Even people who really need to be helped. They tell you they can’t think of a single reason why they could be suffering flailing and spasms. They tell you they want a dull technocrat after the exhausting political psychodrama of the past few years. But they don’t tell you they’ve been taking birth control pills at the same time as undergoing fertility treatment. And they don’t tell you that they’d back the next obviously incompetent degenerate that British politics unearthed for a leadership role if they looked like they’d be fun to have a pint of windscreen wiper fluid with.
If Labour had a clear vision, of course, there wouldn’t be quite so much focus on the leader. But Labour doesn’t have a clear vision. Voters seem to be being asked to surmise one, with only Starmer’s personality to go on. That’s not working out brilliantly. Forgive me giving rein to my inner focus group participant, but the Labour leader’s got the feel of someone who’d ask for your informed consent before kissing you. You sense there’d be a waiver in the air. Once you’d signed it, he’d inform you that the encounter could now progress … no, hang on a mo. Would you mind doing this against a union jack backdrop? Sorry. It would be helpful for his work.
No doubt Starmer’s strategists have spitballed a number of ways of getting him to feel as if he can shoot from the hip. So they’ll at least have considered kidnapping him, rendering him to some kind of Labour blacksite (try Scotland), and using a variety of fringe psychological techniques to strip away all the accrued layers of circumspection and repression and lawyerly caution. After that, it’s a quick spin in the Emosh-o-Tron before Starmer emerges as The Great Connector, able to tell voters a simple story about where he’d like to take them every time he opens his ring binder. Sorry, his mouth. Old habits! As for what he’d say, numerous lines of appeal are already out there. Personally, I’ve long felt people’s inability to see their GP inside of four weeks, and only after having played the 8am phone queue version of the Hunger Games, feels like a good way in to the general sense of abominable societal dysfunction he might consider offering a way out of.
Is it that the Labour leader can’t pull together a vision, or that he won’t? Or that he won’t because he can’t? Until he does, the best thing Keir Starmer has going for him is Boris Johnson, and the best thing Boris Johnson has going for him is Keir Starmer. What an unpromising symbiosis. If you wanted a tagline for prime minister’s questions, you could do worse than “the unwatchable v the unbearable”.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
