Londoner’s Diary
Sir Keir Starmer has accomplished the fairly easy task of seeming normal when asked about household chores in a new interview with Grazia magazine. The same mag interviewed Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty earlier this month, and the pair gave some bizarre responses when asked about housework.
The PM revealed that he often goes up to the Downing Street flat in the middle of the day to make the bed because “it bugs me” that his wife doesn’t do it, and rearranges the dishwasher if she fails to stack it appropriately. In his own Grazia grilling, Starmer said: “Do we all have to stack the dishwasher? Yes, we do. Do we all have to change the bedding? Yes, we do. But I’d never go up and check or criticise my wife when she does it.“Happily we don’t live in a household where we go around criticising each other for the chores, we’re just very glad when the other one’s actually done it.” Ouch.
While Sunak spent his Grazia interview describing some of his wife’s “disgusting” habits, Starmer waxed lyrical over wife Victoria. “She is very grounded… She’s sassy. She’s gorgeous, but she’s absolutely rooted.” He claimed they “don’t really bicker”, preferring to “work through things together”.
A vision of domestic bliss. But will it last in the poky Downing Street flat they might soon be moving into?
Tory case for Keir
Senior Labour politicians can’t stop banging on about Margaret Thatcher. Keir Starmer has praised her for “meaningful change”, and in the past 24 hours, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves attempted to channel her in a speech and shadow foreign secretary David Lammy called her a “visionary”. But why?
Praising Thatcher is a huge Labour taboo, and we had assumed this was a cynical bright lights and loud noises routine to win over Tory voters who still aren’t sure about Labour.
But it’s deeper than that, according to the man who knows Starmer better than anyone else in politics: his biographer Tom Baldwin. At a lecture delivered to the Conservative think tank Bright Blue yesterday, Baldwin made a surprising pitch: the small-C conservative case for Starmer. He explained that Starmer represents “a pragmatic expression of quite familiar British values”, loves going to the pub and shares the views of the ordinary bloke.
A Starmer government, he said, will have “lasting appeal to Conservatives”, and this is “under-appreciated” by Tory politicians who should be “a lot more worried about Starmer’s lasting appeal”. He also praised Starmer for resisting “the swamp of Labour’s minority fringes”. Expect much more of this as a general election approaches.
Judith Butler’s funny turn
The controversial American philosopher Judith Butler is in town promoting their new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler is known for their radical views and loquacious writing style, but in another life they would like to have been a stand-up comedian. “It was always an alternative path for me,” Butler said during a talk at Reference Point bookshop yesterday. “I do regret not having taken it sometimes, especially last week when the media was so rough on me.” Butler has been in the line of fire recently for describing Hamas’s terrorist attack of October 7th as “armed resistance”.
Quiz Majesty’s Treasury
It was a tale of two Treasuries last night as officials were sorted between the in-crowd and the out. A select few, who had helped Jeremy Hunt with his recent Budget, were invited to a drinks reception with the Chancellor to celebrate their success (the bar for budget success is quite low since Liz Truss).
Those who didn’t get the memo held a markedly more dressed-down event, decamping to The Pineapple pub in Lambeth for a Treasury pub quiz. The quiz proceeds helped raise funds for the St Martin-in-the-Fields homelessness charity.
Lit Crewe
Congrats to author Tom Crewe who just got £10,000 richer. Last night Crewe bagged the Sunday Times Young Writer Award, sponsored by the Charlotte Aitken Trust, for his debut novel The New Life. Chair of judges and Sunday Times chief literary critic Johanna Thomas-Corr called the book “bold and beautifully observed”, and said at the ceremony in Brixton that she hoped the award would be an encouragement for writers who are not well-connected in the publishing world or from money. Booker Prize-winning author Sebastian Faulks helped compere the awards ceremony as chair of the Charlotte Aitken Trust. He praised the Trust’s founder Gillon Aitken, the late publishing magnate and literary agent, for leaving his fortune to sponsor such awards.
