BY SEAN WALSH
“Sound out 30 Manchester adjacent constituencies! There must be at least one with a humiliation fetish!”
The “leadership contest” in the Labour Party is like the “war in Iran” in that neither is actually a real thing. Unless you can have a war without any warring or a competition for a job which doesn’t exist. It’s all very “postmodern”, as if things are happening if we just say they are, and that it’s a bit much or racist or something to think there’s any extra-linguistic world to which words apply.
People are now starting to say that the Prime Algorithm seems more “relaxed”. I’ve even heard “demob happy”, even though he hasn’t been demobbed at all and is, on the contrary, mobbing along very contendedly thank you very much. To the extent that contentment is properly ascribable to the LLM still in Downing Street.
It may well be that Starmer’s programmers have adjusted the coding so that the complex of algorithms can fake a sense of humour for the benefit of the people who against all evidence continue to believe that it is a human being. They’re entitled to an upgrade I suppose.
You have to give some credit to Starmer for just getting on with things, even though the things he’s getting on with consolidate the wider political system which is being increasingly turned against the interests, mental health and personal security of everybody caught up in it.
He reminds me of a father who’s told the children to go and play in the garden while he gets on with his work. So Wes, Andy, Tomboy Ange and the rest are outside pretending to be cops or robbers and persuading each other that it’s all very serious and real. Meanwhile, Dad sits at the kitchen table planning the next scam and ignoring the bailiffs banging on the front door.
Which is my way of saying, again, that the most likely outcome of all this is that Starmer remains exactly where he is and the legacy commentators get to carry on announcing his imminent demise for another three years. Longer, if he changes the voting system, which I’m certain is coming down the pipe.
Which brings me to the carnival of the absurd that is the Makerfield By-Election, a cultural moment of such significance that it’s just had its own episode of Question Time on which the candidates -some of them- were able to showcase their own unique brand of total forgettability.
If Burnham wins there then we can only conclude that the constituency has some sort of collective humiliation fetish. Scousemanc’s game plan seems to be to insult the intelligence of the people living there on the basis that this will encourage them to vote for him. If you elect me, I promise you won’t see me again seems to be the message. Which, now I think of it, is more compelling than it should be.
The reply to this from the Burnham supporters is something like this: that if elected as the local MP in order to become PM then that will be great for the constituency in the longer run.
Perhaps I’m missing the point but this seems to me like arguing that a woman who is a 5 should be grateful that her husband has a mistress who is a 9. But I’m no expert in any of these things.
I still don’t think this will work out as Burnham intends. As I’ve written before this plot is all a bit too Kind Hearts and Coronets for me. At the end of that film Dennis Price, we think, gets his comeuppance. There are always invisible variables, the “unknown unknowns” as Donald Rumsfeld put it.
Meanwhile Starmer carries on, impervious to it all, seemingly. In a sense an inspirational and very unlikely Zen master.