MUCH as I despise the rampantly dishonest mainstream media, it is sometimes instructive to look at what they are saying. A superb example of this was offered by Josh Glancy in the Sunday Times last weekend, where all the faults of both our egregious Prime Minister and the legacy media that gives him such an easy ride were laid out in startling clarity.
Glancy was given extended access as Starmer trudged around the North on a sort of mini-campaign trail, a curious thing to be doing years away from a general election. Glancy was there as Starmer questioned submariners about the nuclear deterrent and there as he answered questions from children (‘is it fun being Prime Minister?’).
There’s a certain irony in the way Glancy opened his article by sympathetic reference to the child’s question, using it to reflect on how tough life must be for our embattled Prime Minister who has so many nasty people criticising him all the time. As the article continued, it became more and more obviously a supportive puff-piece, leading up to the conclusion that ‘there is a sincere and considerate man in there, too, someone who really does care about the people he governs’.
It was a line more than any other that showed both why Glancy had been given extended access, and what the article was for. As Starmer tramped his trail, his loyal media retainer trotted after, wondering how on earth he could get anyone to like the subject of his piece. I sympathise with any hack given such an impossible task, and even admit a certain wary respect for the determined professionalism with which Glancy completes what must have been one of the toughest brown-nose assignments he’s ever been given.
The ostensible reason for the article was the announcement that Starmer intends to fight the next election, and fight to remain in post as Labour leader despite significant grumbling discontent over his performance.
But what’s most interesting about it all is that Glancy has to reference the reasons why people dislike Sir Keir Starmer en route to telling us that we shouldn’t. He mentions the strained relationship with the US over the Iran conflict and Britain’s pathetic (and typically Starmer-esque) position of undermining an ally, refusing to do anything real, pretending to be a key player, and pandering to his own domestic submission to the Islamic vote all at the same time.
He mentions the spectacular self-inflicted car crash of Starmer’s fantastic wheeze of rehabilitating Peter Mandelson to serve as UK Ambassador to the US in order to give Starmer the opportunity to trot out facile excuses.
We should be fully clear on what the Mandelson scandal illustrates, because I can assure you that Glancy isn’t. This was a man who had already lost multiple posts and been embroiled in scandal every time he was given a job. This is a Prime Minister, this is a government, this is a whole political system completely out of touch with the general public, out of touch with reality, out of touch with morality and decency, and even out of touch with the kind of self-interested and pragmatic political awareness that would have told them that rehabilitating Blair-era spin doctors, with or without subsequently revealed close personal friendships with a notorious paedophile was not a good idea.
It was a staggeringly stupid decision that could only be made within the Westminster Bubble, where Peter remained ‘one of us’ so far as other Labourites, apparatchiks and gruesome crooks smugly managing the State to ruin are concerned.
What’s really frightening in the piece is the realisation that the Prime Minister who has had the lowest approval ratings in history only a year and nine months into his first term, hasn’t got the faintest idea why anyone dislikes him or why he should get any flak for the Peter Thing (or for anything else that’s been disastrously mismanaged since the election).
Every part of the interview (which remember is clearly designed to address and dismiss each concern and support the final conclusion that this is a fundamentally decent person competently tackling big issues) reveals just how monumentally self-satisfied and criminally self-blind Keir Starmer actually is.
First, he’s got the entitled view that people such as himself, people with metropolitan leftist received opinions they don’t have the wit or sanity to question, embody Goodness, with all criticism easily discounted as Evil, as ‘Far Right’:
‘I think it’s going to be a very important general election. It’s likely to be Labour versus Reform. An election where the defining question is, what is it to be British? An election where what I would call patriotic values of tolerance, decency, live and let live, diversity, are under challenge like we’ve never seen before.’
This is the same tired baloney that was being spouted after Southport, and used to excuse the most disgusting and flagrant two-tier justice and assaults on free speech in modern British history. Opponents of the government, defenders of vulnerable women and children, people worried about mass immigration, terrorism, child abuse or asylum hotels, are all told that they are wicked and racist for feeling such concerns, that their fears are indecent and un-British. There’s not a flicker of awareness that we are all tired of hearing our legitimate concerns and desire for safety treated with this patrician disdain.
The overall impression of Glancy’s article therefore confirms everything unpleasant we suspect about Starmer. If criticism gets through the blanket smear that anyone voicing it is Far Right, his next response is to blame someone else and claim total innocence. Starmer has no compunction about flinging others overboard to save himself. Mandelson was dropped, then Sir Olly Robbins. In both cases Starmer claims that his judgement is not at fault because others omitted the truth and he’s just far too important and busy to check:
‘If I questioned every bit of information put in front of me I would never get anything done. The number of decisions that have to be made each day is huge.’
It’s the ultimate sequence of lawyers’ evasions and bureaucrats’ excuses. Responsibility is deployed both as a defence (‘I’m looking at a huge amount of things’) and deflected downwards in the organisation (‘Honestly, I mean, I get information from officials’).
There’s another and particularly hilarious example in the interview of how Starmer operates when Glancy discusses whether he put pressure on Sir Robbins over Mandelson. ‘There are different types of pressure,’ the weasel responds, rather like Bill Clinton explaining a selective definition of sexual relations.
But surely the biggest lie in all this is ultimately not all the glaring hypocrisies and evasions of the PM himself, but that crowning conclusion offered by his interviewer. We are shown an evasive, entitled, morally self-blind man, a man with a jobsworth’s irritated disgust that public discord should reach his ears and interrupt his Very Important Work, and we are told that he does it all for us.
I’m just too important to care about all this trivial nonsense, says the man that Glancy would have us believe ‘really does care about the people he governs’.
You don’t have to be a grooming gang victim recalling Sir Keir’s stint as the Director of Public Prosecutions, a protester against asylum hotels, or even a Brit who voted for Brexit, to choke on that one. I suspect many people who have encountered Starmer professionally, even in his own party, would too.
Starmer, of course, insists in the piece that he still has the firm backing of most Labour MPs. This may even be true. He certainly seems to have the firm backing, via Glancy, of the Sunday Times and the Murdoch Empire. The interesting question there is why that continues, given appalling judgements such as the Mandelson appointment and an approval rating in the toilet. Is it simply that other Labour choices would be just as bad, or is it something more sinister? For now, the legacy media want Starmer to remain in place and are trying to defend him. If they weren’t, he would already be gone.
