BY JACK LANG
You have to understand the type. In Kipling’s India, you would meet him at a hill station, a man who would explain the local customs to you very slowly, as if you were a mildly defective coolie. He had a small moustache, a smaller sense of humour, and a profound belief that the universe would reorganise itself if only everyone filled out the right forms in triplicate.
That man is now Prime Minister. His name is Keir Starmer. And the joke going round the smoking rooms, the one they do not tell him to his face, is that he has begun to compare himself, privately and with a straight face, to Winston Churchill.
Now, Churchill was a vain old buccaneer who genuinely believed he was St George. He said so himself, more or less. He saw Hitler as the dragon, Europe as the damsel, and himself as the fellow on the horse with the pointy stick. It was absurd, of course, but it was magnificent absurdity. It had brio. It had booze. It had a man who had fought in the cavalry and painted sunsets and called his own moods ‘the black dog’ as if the dog were a minor nuisance rather than a clinical diagnosis.
Starmer has none of this. Starmer has a black dog of his own, but it is a rescue dog from a reputable charity, and he has filled out the adoption paperwork correctly, and the dog is not permitted on the furniture, and its name is ‘Mr Snuffles’ because the children chose it, and he has mentioned this in four separate broadcast interviews as evidence of his ordinary humanity.
So when you ask, ‘Who does Keir Starmer think he is?’ the answer is not St George. The answer is something much funnier and much sadder.
He thinks he is the man who has been sent to clear up the mess after the dragon has finished its work. Not to slay the beast, you understand. That would be vulgar. That would involve risk. That would require a lance, and lances are pointy, and someone might get hurt, and then there would be an inquiry.
No: Starmer sees himself as the fellow who arrives the morning after, with a clipboard and a high-visibility waistcoat, to conduct a ‘lessons learnt’ exercise. He interviews the survivors. He notes the structural weaknesses in the castle walls. He recommends a new fire-safety protocol for the stables. He thanks the dragon for its co-operation and assures it that no further action will be taken, provided it submits a full account of its carbon emissions by the next quarter.
This is his tragedy. He genuinely believes that good administration is the same thing as heroism. He believes that a well-run committee is a moral victory. He believes that the dragon, if properly engaged in a stakeholder consultation, will eventually agree to a managed decline of its dragonish activities and perhaps rebrand as a ‘large-scale narrative challenge’.
Meanwhile, the country is burning. Or not burning, exactly; it is smouldering, in the way that damp cardboard smoulders, producing no flame but a great deal of acrid smoke and a faint smell of failure. The bins are uncollected. The hospitals are full. The small boats keep coming. And the Prime Minister, in his identical blue suit, stands before the dispatch box and explains, with the patient condescension of a man telling a child that there is no Father Christmas, that the dragon is a complex cross-departmental issue requiring a whole-system approach (the wrong answer to the wrong question).
The snide genius of it is that he does not even know he is ridiculous. Churchill knew. Churchill leaned into the absurdity. He enjoyed being a caricature. He lit a cigar, poured a whisky, and winked at the world as if to say, ‘Yes, I know. Isn’t it magnificent?’
Starmer would never wink. He would be afraid of being reported to the Standards Commissioner. He would issue a statement: ‘The Prime Minister notes that a facial muscular contraction occurred, but no breach of the Ministerial Code is alleged.’
So here we are. The dragon is still at the gate. The people are muttering. And the man who thinks he is a steady hand on the tiller is, in fact, the fellow who has just run the ship aground while looking for a risk assessment for the iceberg.
God save the King. And someone tell the Prime Minister that St George had a lance, not a laptop.
Jack Lang is a teacher from West Yorkshire.