Last night, Keir Starmer performed as The Gambler in a tiny space with cheap scenery and three journalists. The Labour leader’s promise to resign if Durham police issue him with a fixed penalty notice looked like an off-off-off-Broadway production that can only run to four actors who play all the parts. (No spoilers, but some of the above will return in later scenes as the executioners). As such, it certainly marks a new entry into the annals of hilariously mad-looking press conferences. For me, the only thing missing was Tiger Woods’ mum sitting purse-lipped in the front row, like she was in 2010 when Tiger apologised to the world for his cocktail waitress habit. “Integrity” was the big buzzword on that occasion, as it was with Starmer yesterday, with Woods promising “to start living a life of integrity”. Didn’t win a major again for nine years. So … read into that what you will.
Starmer’s soliloquy certainly wasn’t good enough for the Daily Mail, which this morning has wet its collective pants that the Labour leader has had the temerity to answer the one question the Mail would have screamed at him for months if he hadn’t. As their Depend-wearing splash headline has it: “STARMER ACCUSED OF PILING PRESSURE ON POLICE”. I like the idea that you can “pressurise” the police. Can someone let me know how to do this, because I’m yet to receive so much as a callback over a burglary that took place over the Easter weekend. Happy to do an am-dram Tiger if necessary.
The main thing to understand is that after months of their unilateral “special operation” on Beergate, this is the Mail’s victory parade. Today’s multi-article offering is the heavy artillery being wheeled through Fleet Street’s Red Square. There’s the classic late 1980s Stephen Glover missile (couple of near misses on the job but still claimed to be serviceable). Later-years weaponry tells its own sadly diminished story, of course. The supposedly state-of-the-art Wootton drone is actually just a Canon DSLR taped inside some bulky casing.
But the big question on some lips is: have the game theorists at the Mail made a strategic miscalculation, effectively steering Tory MPs up the escalation ladder towards moving against their boy Johnson? For those of us who feel like this entire mushrooming shitshow is like watching the Cuban missile crisis re-enacted by the cast of Made in Chelsea, the signs are promising/infuriating (delete according to taste). Miscalculation certainly seems to be the judgment of Islington-based newsletter writer Dominic Cummings, who fired off another of his occasionally coherent tweets yesterday afternoon, in which he electronically cackled at the sight of supposed client journalists messing up their forward induction, and ending up accidentally working for the other side. Which is to say: for him. As Dominic had it, everyone in Westminster is “working on the Vote Leave operation to remove” Boris Johnson.
Maybe. Either way, one of my very favourite things in politics is Cummings acting like Vote Leave is still a massive thing. He reminds me of Gary King, the Simon Pegg character in The World’s End, insisting to his deeply unwilling ex-friends that they get back together to recreate their epic pub crawl from 23 years earlier. “Fucking hell, Caino! What do you mean you don’t drink any more? That’s like a lion eating hummus!”. In fact, now that Benedict Cumberbatch has had his fun, I’d truly love to see what Pegg would do with the role of “Dominic Cummings”. You just know it would be it incredibly funny, but also elegiac and quietly heartbreaking.
As for Starmer, the film that came to mind while watching his press conference was the South Park movie. When Keir was going “It’s about me! It’s about what I believe in politics! It’s a matter of integrity!”, I was reminded of the Canadian guy shouting “This is not aboot diplomacy! This is aboot dignity! This is aboot respect!”, and all the Americans falling about laughing. I mean, the Canadian guy IS actually in the right, but … yeah. A hard watch. I’m actually trying to think how any of this, at all, could now be more excruciating. At least no one has yet suggested David Miliband standing in Wakefield.
Against the backdrop of the actually excruciating cost of living crisis, however, the current spectacle is looking increasingly surreal. And, dare I say it, increasingly like an all-male production. Even Angela Rayner’s promise to also resign if she was given an FPN happened offstage, like the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. From the snapper of the Beergate photograph (James Delingpole’s boy, as it turns out), to the Mail thrusters, to Cummings, to the weird machismo of Johnson’s reported description of Starmer as out of tune with the “raw instincts” of Brits, I can’t help noticing of late that women characters have sort of melted away/backed away from this increasingly histrionic story.
Why is that? Just some mad statistical fluke I guess. Even so, I can’t help feeling that ladies across the nation are otherwise engaged, perhaps answering work emails at midnight while putting on a dark wash, sourcing a schoolchild’s platinum jubilee costume and wondering how on earth they’re going to bridge the gap between last May’s energy bills and this May’s. Thank heavens for the less emotional sex, then, who are out there in Red Square living their victorious lives for the rest of us.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
