BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
The Labour political animal, when cornered, does not fight. It shuffles. It rearranges the deck chairs on its own personal Titanic with the frantic energy of a person who believes the problem is not the iceberg but the upholstery. The recent reshuffle debacle in Westminster conjures not high statesmanship, but the memory of a rugby tournament in the Canaries—a festival of incompetence where the concept of hitting rock bottom was treated not as a warning, but as a challenge to seize a pneumatic drill.
Our team was a collection of the uncoordinated, the asthmatic, and the wilfully delusional. We were catastrophically bad. We lost to local sides comprised of men who considered a pre-match cigar and a triple brandy the only necessary warm-up after a sleepless night in the clubs. But the true descent into a sporting Hades began with injuries. The cry would go up for substitutes, and from the nearby tascas would shamble the local Spanish players, exuding a potent mixture of resentment and last night’s garlic prawns.
To call them ‘players’ is an offence against the English language. They were homunculi in mismatched boots, seemingly sent by a capricious demon to enact a blasphemous parody of the sport.
One, a man whose physique brought to mind a half-empty sack of porridge, believed his primary role was to profusely apologise to the opposition after missing a tackle. Another, a creature of pure, gibbering panic, would simply catch the ball and immediately adopt the foetal position, awaiting the inevitable ruck as if it were a divine punishment. They were not merely bad; they were an active, malevolent force for entropy. We were not just scraping the barrel; we were gouging out the fungoid, rotten wood at its very bottom.
This memory returned to me a week or so ago, fouling an otherwise pleasant afternoon, as I observed the Prime Minister’s reshuffle. The long-overdue defenestration of Angela Rayner—a woman who styled herself as a sleaze-buster with the same unselfconscious irony as a pyromaniac founding a fire brigade—forced weak Starmer’s hand. The resulting ministerial changes were not a refresh. They were a panic-stricken triage. A desperate, sweating attempt to plug the gaping holes in a sinking hull with whatever damp, pliable moral compromise was closest to hand.
The promotion of two-tier Shabana Mahmood to Home Secretary was a masterstroke of cynical, modern brutality. A woman whose solution to complex penal reform appears to be borrowed from a particularly unhinged appendix of the Malleus Maleficarum. Invest in stones. Her elevation is an appointment designed for one purpose: to signal a visceral, atavistic thuggishness to the baying mob.
She will not last a year.
Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper was booted upstairs to the Foreign Office, a move that reeks of parking a troublesome asset in a gilded siding. Her reward for a tenure at the Home Office marked by a majestic failure to solve the small boats crisis was a new brief where her failure will be conducted at 30,000 feet, insulated by diplomatic protocol and, judging by her pallor, industrial quantities of Wotsits. She is to be thrown to the wolf that is Donald Trump, a man who will doubtless view her sensible shoes and laminated policy briefings with the contemptuous bewilderment of a Visigoth king presented with a spreadsheet detailing the benefits of Roman plumbing.
The rest is mere musical chairs for the terminally mediocre. Pat McFadden, he of the spectacles fashioned from the bottoms of Coke bottles, is shifted to a new ministry for welfare, a punishment detail for a man who thought his days of herding feral cats were behind him. Peter Kyle (Who? A man whose defining characteristic is a perpetually surprised expression, as if he has just remembered he left the gas on) was sent to Business, his wet-behind-the-ears enthusiasm now to be deployed in soothing the furrowed brows of industrialists who will devour him for a light amuse-bouche. Jonathan Reynolds, a man with the palpable presence of a ghost at a feast, is now Chief Whip—a ‘solicitor’ put in charge of disciplining a parliamentary party with the intellectual cohesion of a fog, following in the footsteps of the repulsive Nick Brown.
They speak, these Fabian useful idiots, in a dead language of ‘delivery’, ‘milestones’ and ‘phase two’. It is the empty, metallic clatter of a broken machine, some noise and no purpose. There is no project, only positioning. Moral relativism pulls at the edges until you’re left with blancmange. No philosophy now, only a desperate, furtive panic—the same stark terror I saw in the eyes of my Spanish teammate, Jorge, as the ball spiralled towards him and he realised, with a dawning, existential horror, that he was expected not merely to catch it, but to advance with it.
The public sees this. They see these awful players being sent onto the pitch, pulling on the shirt of state. They hear the empty, guttural roar from the Reform UK crowd, a sound of pure, undiluted hatred for the entire farcical game. And they know, with a cold, sickening certainty, that both teams are now playing in the same league of contemptible, soul-crushing failure. The only question that remains is not who will win, but how long the spectators will bother to stay and watch this dismal, endlessly repeating match.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).