Sunak and Starmer share several qualities of which neither may be aware. One of these is their intellectual mediocrity manifest not least in the flatulent dreariness of their rhetoric by means of which they spout hard-line pabulum in the hope that it will pass through the digestive tract of tabloid editors and discharge into print. In this respect Starmer’s efforts will always be in vain because the tabloids operate on the level of the Trumpian-Tea-Party-Southern-Baptist-Mississippi-Burning US Republican Party. They cheer for the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Farage and Hannan - politicians who leave attentive voters unable to tell whether they are playboys treating the country as a board game or defectives who should be committed to an asylum for the clinically insane.
Another quality shared by Starmer and Sunak is that neither have much time for the truth. Of the two, Sunak is the more straightforward fabricator. Dependably mendacious, he trots out non-existent triumphs and fantasy commitments from a supermarket bag of bottled nonsense. Starmer by contrast leans less on transparent mendacity than on a faculty of forgetfulness in which previous assertions are set aside and promises broken with the casual nonchalance of a junk-bond spiv.
In the absence of any discernible charisma, Sunak’s most salient attribute is his ubiquitous grin - on display regardless of whether he is captured on camera pulling a pint at his local - even though he doesn’t drink - or taking the air in Kiev like a holidaymaker after a good lunch while his host, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, frowns from a distance. Though Sunak’s displays of contentment are for public consumption - to show that he is in control of events - he nonetheless parries the most innocuous questions from journalists with falsity and fudge, revealing thereby that he has little of value to say either to his own country or to the world beyond. Without notes he is an ignoramus, a political nonentity who couldn’t even beat the appalling Liz Truss to the party leadership, which he secured in the end by default because no other Tory MP felt up to the job. Sunak differes from them solely in his lack of awareness of his own inadequacy.
Starmer, for his part, rests his credentials for governing the country on his upbringing by a tool-maker and a nurse in a pebble-dash semi. One wonders about the kind of voter who would interpret that banal collage as a reason to vote Labour. One of Starmer’s old student friends told me that he used to be “quite a radical”. As he inches ever closer to aping Tory policies on pretty-well everything: putting asylum seekers in barges, making Brexit work, keeping us out of the single market, lambasting green campaigners, opposing electoral reform and so on, he appears to have undergone a Damascene conversion in reverse. His radicalism has been lobotomised along with the progressive ambitions of the previous leadership about renationalising public services, taxing income from capital and labour at the same rate and replacing the Lords with an elected chamber. If Sunak kindles disbelief Starmer evokes incredulity. Neither are to be taken at face value.
Lacking a written constitution, the Westminster parliament has depended for its integrity on the honourable conduct of its members and, above all, on the honesty of political leaders. Now we look back with nostalgia on the days when those values held sway. Striding the stage of UK politics today, we no longer see the principled - if flawed - men and women of tradition, but instead a gaggle of dissemblers and cheats. For the forseeable future elections will be won by those most adept at presuading citizens to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears; in other words by chancers with second-rate minds and questionable ethics.
Another quality shared by Starmer and Sunak is that neither have much time for the truth. Of the two, Sunak is the more straightforward fabricator. Dependably mendacious, he trots out non-existent triumphs and fantasy commitments from a supermarket bag of bottled nonsense. Starmer by contrast leans less on transparent mendacity than on a faculty of forgetfulness in which previous assertions are set aside and promises broken with the casual nonchalance of a junk-bond spiv.
In the absence of any discernible charisma, Sunak’s most salient attribute is his ubiquitous grin - on display regardless of whether he is captured on camera pulling a pint at his local - even though he doesn’t drink - or taking the air in Kiev like a holidaymaker after a good lunch while his host, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, frowns from a distance. Though Sunak’s displays of contentment are for public consumption - to show that he is in control of events - he nonetheless parries the most innocuous questions from journalists with falsity and fudge, revealing thereby that he has little of value to say either to his own country or to the world beyond. Without notes he is an ignoramus, a political nonentity who couldn’t even beat the appalling Liz Truss to the party leadership, which he secured in the end by default because no other Tory MP felt up to the job. Sunak differes from them solely in his lack of awareness of his own inadequacy.
Starmer, for his part, rests his credentials for governing the country on his upbringing by a tool-maker and a nurse in a pebble-dash semi. One wonders about the kind of voter who would interpret that banal collage as a reason to vote Labour. One of Starmer’s old student friends told me that he used to be “quite a radical”. As he inches ever closer to aping Tory policies on pretty-well everything: putting asylum seekers in barges, making Brexit work, keeping us out of the single market, lambasting green campaigners, opposing electoral reform and so on, he appears to have undergone a Damascene conversion in reverse. His radicalism has been lobotomised along with the progressive ambitions of the previous leadership about renationalising public services, taxing income from capital and labour at the same rate and replacing the Lords with an elected chamber. If Sunak kindles disbelief Starmer evokes incredulity. Neither are to be taken at face value.
Lacking a written constitution, the Westminster parliament has depended for its integrity on the honourable conduct of its members and, above all, on the honesty of political leaders. Now we look back with nostalgia on the days when those values held sway. Striding the stage of UK politics today, we no longer see the principled - if flawed - men and women of tradition, but instead a gaggle of dissemblers and cheats. For the forseeable future elections will be won by those most adept at presuading citizens to ignore the evidence of their eyes and ears; in other words by chancers with second-rate minds and questionable ethics.
