Middle Class Holes 35 - Keir Starmer

I met a man who wasn’t there

I know this may cause scoffing out there - considering - but I don’t normally choose to spend my time thinking a great deal about people I don’t like. The majority of the subjects in Middle Class Holes are daft, or lost, or both, but most importantly funny. I’m not obsessive about them; I don’t spend hours scrolling through their antediluvian tweets or frantically re-editing their Wikipedia pages. Looking up and down the list, the emotion the names bring out in me is chiefly amusement mixed with soul-tiredness.

Loathing is hard to make interesting or readable. It’s one of the flattest emotions, and it deadens the creative spark. I feel a steady rumble of it for the likes of some around the current British cabinet table; Reeves, Miliband, Powell. (Though I only just realised that Miliband is genuinely literally bonkers, in a ‘please don’t sit next to me on the bus’ way - his recent conference speech resembled nothing so closely as the kind of rant you might hear in a town centre before the perpetrator is gently moved on by the authorities.)

I thought I felt loathing for today’s subject, so I was putting him off for the later stages, as a kind of climax to the whole Middle Class Holes shebang. It felt like I needed a big finish, and he is the Prime Minister, after all. But recent events have crystallised my thoughts.

Hate is a shameful, unfashionable, low status and gauche emotion. What can you do with it? It’s a waste of time in a functioning democracy, like the one we used to have.

I prefer to find the laughs. In later life you can almost feel a pang of fellow feeling for people you loathed in youth, like Dracula and Van Helsing turning to each other mid-scrap with a chuckle to say ‘remember the old days, eh?’

But the more I considered it - and it’s hard to avoid considering it, because he is in our faces all day, every day - I realised that I didn’t actually hate Keir Starmer. I mistook what I was experiencing for hate.

What was I experiencing? An emotion I’ve never really felt before. It took me this long to twig, because after the hormonal dumping of early adolescence you think you’re equipped with the full emotional palate. The idea that there might be feelings you’ve never felt, either personally or vicariously, takes a while to register - as you might not immediately spot a totally unfamiliar colour in your 288-shade Crayola colouring set.

Starmer is far odder than any of us appreciated, and causes a reaction that is equivalently odd. That reaction sits in my system and I feel I’ve got to get it out, ASAP, like a kidney stone. This has been an eerie and difficult writing experience, and occasionally I’ve felt like throwing in the sponge. He is very hard to capture accurately. As the St Winifred’s School Choir so nearly had it, there’s no one quite like Starmer.

The simplest way I can put it is that while some of his colleagues might give you the screaming abdabs, Starmer gives you - well, me anyway - the creeping abdabs.

Let’s do the admin. Obviously we all know the background details - the toolmaker father, the pebble-dashed semi in Reigate with bunk beds and no room to swing a cat, the council scholarship to the grammar school. It seems respectable lower middle class to me, though appropriately, like many things about Starmer, it is strangely uncategorisable.

He joined the Labour Party’s Young Socialists organisation aged 16 in 1978, obviously inspired by what a splendid job the party was doing in government at that time. There followed a successful legal career of the fairly standard leftist activist type, and eventually his elevation to the job of head of the CPS, Director of Public Prosecutions, ie the nation’s nicker-in-chief. Nobody was surprised when our bright boy became an MP in 2015, or that he swiftly slithered into Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, and from there vaulted up to become Labour leader (following a shockingly dishonest campaign, the transparently duplicitous nature of which was obvious to everybody except the chumps who swallowed it and voted him in).

Loyal right hand

The Keir Starmer who took the reins of Labour in 2020 was written off from day one. This was ‘Keith’, the droning placeholder of a spod, the soon-to-be-forgotten ‘second referendum’ twit in the glorious epoch of Boris, destined to be the name you couldn’t quite remember in a pub quiz. Obviously, he could never hope to be Prime Minister. For that to happen, the Tories would have to lose in constituencies like Chesham and Amersham, the sort of impossible event which ought to bring the world to an end. Jacob Rees-Mogg would have to lose his seat. Unthinkable things like that.

Much has, obviously, been written about the man himself and his foibles. You will have your own favourites, but here are mine.

There was his own specific parliamentary bill to secure an increase in his personal pension. Really, this happened!

Then there is the voice - a cornucopia for sketch writers. We could fill pages with descriptions of the thing - an expiring corncrake, a Dalek suffering stasis of the lower bowel, a fart in a coffin, etc. His love of football feels like something an alien would simulate, trying to blend in with our ways - ‘I follow the game like any other carbon-based life form’.

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His presence at any festive occasion is excruciating -

Then there is his adherence to any passing fad the humans around him are doing, however inappropriate or ill-advised -

And of course there is his stilted, uncanny use of English as a fifth language. He doesn’t stop for a bite - no, there is a ‘pause for food’. His recent keynote conference speech, where he attempted to wax lyrical about the small things that make Britain great, referred to ‘painting a fence’ and ‘cutting the half-time orange’. Painting a fence, in Britain? It reminded me a bit, in its culturally distant oddness, of Abba. I can see Agnetha, in snow-dusted furs, looking wistfully into the lens - ‘You painted me a fence/you tidied up the grime/and in the local park/you cut the orange at half-time’.

There is certainly much activity in Starmer, a lot of doing. But what makes him go?