Sir Keir Starmer was magnificent. Resplendent. No, really – you had to marvel at the spectacle.
In all my time, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard such a heaving load of old codswallop delivered by any MP.
The Labour leader outlined his ‘five-point mission’ to fix the NHS, economy, crime, and energy and education systems.
It was a half-hour speech so breathtakingly banal you almost had to stick toothpicks to hold open your eyelids and check this wasn’t some sort of Peter Cook-scripted spoof.
UN weapons inspectors armed with the latest satellite imagery and infra-red heat-seeking technology could have combed all eight pages of the speech and still struggled to have found anything remotely concrete.
Labour Party Leader, Sir Keir Starmer delivers a speech during the unveiling of plans for a ‘Mission-Led’ Labour government at Co-Op HQ on February 23, 2023 in Manchester
It was a half-hour speech so breathtakingly banal you almost had to stick toothpicks to hold open your eyelids and check this wasn’t some sort of Peter Cook-scripted spoo
It was a masterclass in management verbiage, a wilting salad of dreary buzzwords. Our setting was the Co-operative Group headquarters – 15 uninviting storeys in central Manchester. Crowd? Largely middle-aged and affluent-looking. Very New Labour.
Sir Keir arrived all jazz hands and game show smarm. ‘Fantastic to be here!’ he bellowed, looking flustered. ‘Great to be in Manchester. Brilliant.’ In a crisp white shirt, he remained robotically still. With one hand he stubbornly gripped the lectern, like a struggling swimmer clinging to a rubber ring.
He kicked off with an obligatory football reference, comparing Labour to his beloved Arsenal, who are currently riding high in the Premier League thanks to what he called ‘teamwork, excellence and a blend of skills’.
Funny. For a man who supposedly understands football, Starmer always sounds as though he’s just had the rules explained to him. The Tories were ‘devoid of ideas’, he told the room. What were his ideas? We didn’t hear any, though he did promise to make Britain the highest-growing economy in the G7.
Good idea! Strange that no one has thought of that before. He also pledged to ‘fix our relationship with the EU’ – Remainer code for cosying up to Brussels once he’s safely in power.
PICTURED: Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner at the Manchester based event where he opened his speech with a obligatory Arsenal reference
But that was it for serious proposals. His language remained as sterile as a smear of Domestos.
He spoke wonkishly of ‘frameworks’ and ‘compasses’, whatever that means. He pledged to make the streets safer by being ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. I’m sure I’ve heard that before.
But while Tony Blair, who coined the slogan, was willing to make gutsy attacks on the Left of his party and took on the unions even while in opposition, Starmer’s speech contained nothing bold whatsoever.
He was trying to bore himself into power. There came a repeated promise to lead a ‘mission-driven Government’. He must have said it more than a dozen times. What did it even mean?
Soon we were on to his plans for turning Britain into a ‘clean-energy superpower’. Time was when Labour manifestos made crackpot spending commitments. But since the Tories have stolen that ground, nowadays it’s all about setting pie-in-the-sky green targets.
Sure enough, we were promised that under Labour, Britain’s energy supplies will be carbon-neutral by 2030. Believe that when you see it.
The half-hour mark passed and the meaningless slogans continued. There was talk of a ‘national renewal for a new national purpose’.
We ended on some claptrap about ‘a Britain we can walk towards together’, which sounded like something you might read on an advert for Dignitas – not an unappealing prospect after a speech like that.
Questions from the media came and were met with lots of head-scratching from the Dear Leader.
An ITV reporter wondered what Starmer would do on his first day in Government.
It was an open goal – a perfect headline-stealing opportunity.
Would he banish zero-hours contracts? Would he drag the remaining hereditary peers from their taxpayer-subsidised nosebags in the Lords?
Er, no. Starmer waffled on about putting the necessary ‘building blocks’ in place.
Oh, brother. If he thinks the voters will tolerate this sort of empty twaddle should he make it to No 10, he’s in for a nasty shock.
