Harriet Harman once described a politician’s waking nightmare. As social security secretary in the New Labour government, she was delivering her first speech to the party conference in October 1997. “All these unfamiliar words started coming up on the autocue. I couldn’t go back to my notes, and just had to carry on. I realised that Gordon Brown had made the changes to delete all my references to spending plans.”
Something similar happened to Keir Starmer in May, as he read a speech on immigration from the prompter in Downing Street. He told Tom Baldwin, his biographer, in an interview published on Friday, that when the unfamiliar phrase “an island of strangers” scrolled up on the glass screens, he just read it out.
