BY SEAN WALSH
This “leadership” talk is yet another devil’s illusion.
We were expecting a Jason Statham or a John Wick blockbuster. Instead of that we’re being served up one of those interminable Scandinavian things. Not noir either, like The Killing, but worthier fare. With themes. Of interest only to the critics.
Actually that’s unfair to the interminable Scandinavian things. Whatever is happening in the Labour party is certainly less elevated than a Wild Strawberries, with its cinematic interrogation of themes of memory and personal identity.
Just to be clear: there is no “Labour leadership contest”, any more than there is a “war” in Iran. What we do have is an unseemly and frankly childish sequence of choreographed skirmishes within one section of the entitlement class.
I’ve lived through leadership contests where the unlikeliest candidate emerges as PM. The transition from Thatcher to Major, for example. A story of political entropy, a significant downgrade, to be sure. But real and moment-to-moment unpredictable nevertheless.
I’m less used to the situation we have now, where the sitting PM remains defiantly in place “against the odds”, as imaginary battles are fought out in the minds of potential successors, all dutifully written up by the excitable types in the political media, who for some reason believe, or pretend to believe, that all this stuff is real and assume the rest of us are as captivated as they are.
This is the funniest part of the mass illusion, the cognitive inertia of the “experts” who were so uniformly convinced that Starmer was going to resign last week that they now interpret even the most trivial non-event as confirming the imminence of just that. It’s as if they’re in a Beckett play. The Christians of the early Church were more adept at expectation-adjustment when His return did not fit the presumed timeline.
This, then, is what’s happening now: nothing. The Prime Algorithm, with uncharacteristic adroitness, has filibustered a challenge to his position by walking up to the crisis and pouring a bucket of process all over it. He made Wes Streeting look like the old woman at the supermarket checkout, who when asked to pay looks startled and starts rummaging around in her purse looking for her card and crumpled discount vouchers. “81 votes? Yes of course. It’s in here somewhere. I had it when I left the sheltered flat.”
And then we have the post-modern “candidacy” of Andy Burnham, who will be running in Makerfield on a promise to completely ignore the concerns of the voters there if in return they help him move to Downing Street. A more perverse electoral compact has never been concocted. The strategy seems to genuinely be to insult people into voting for him. Things are so weird now that it wouldn’t be surprising if it worked.
I find all this amusing because it’s so serious and the best way to take serious things seriously is to find ways to laugh at them. Laughter is metanoia, the best spiritual medicine. It’s serious because the politicians and the people who write about them are using language not so much to lie as to distort. Make believe is noble and imaginative; pretence is fake and fantastical. And this is what the devil loves – when something beautiful, in this case language, is distorted and intentionally bent out of shape.
This is what relativism and subjectivism do. They infect the language and go to work turning the beautiful into the ugly by distortion, equivocation, persuasive definition and ambiguity. Thus, the language of environmental stewardship becomes the hard mathematics of Net Zero; the metaphysical truths about sexual intercourse are discarded and sex is talked about as if it is just one more transaction. Etc.
We are being urged to believe that something is happening when a second’s reflection reveals that nothing is changing at all.
Some of the “conspiracy” commentators are half right when they speculate that all this is a distraction, and that the wider Leftist agenda -the dissolution of the nation state via the vaporisation of border control for example- is immune to changes of personnel at the head of a purely nominal government.
But the distraction is cleverer and more theological than that. We are being invited into a world of fantasy politics and the danger is that we will come to talk in the language of that world, of powers and principalities, and forget that a deeper and more sacramental language is still available.
This “leadership” nonsense is fake. Time to wake up to that and laugh it all off. Trust me, there’s plenty of material.