Is Starmer Unfit For The Job?
There's a very insightful article about Starmer written by Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday. It is behind a paywall so I have copied it below. Look away now if you think Starmer a top man in the top job ...Can it be that the Great Prosecutor Starmer is a colourless empty nobody unfit for the top?Is it possible that Sir Keir Starmer simply isn't up to the job the Labour Party tried so hard to get for him? Anyone who observes modern politics knows that many who now struggle to the top of the greasy pole are deeply unwonderful. I am always amused by journalists who boast of their conversations with 'ministers', as if such people are especially intelligent, informed or talented. Most of them are dullard careerists who hope for an easy route to wealth and status.How could Sir Keir, for instance, not have realised that his childlike readiness to accept shiny gifts was a danger childlike readiness to accept shiny gifts was a danger? Honestly, free suits for him and free dresses for his wife? VIP seats at concerts and football matches? This would be a very cheap price to accept for your soul, if you thought you had one, as he doesn't. Perhaps the free glasses failed to improve his vision and made him unable to spot approaching disaster.We are always told he is the great prosecutor, but really, is heading a staff of trained lawyers, with all the prestige and money of the state on your side, so hard? I'd be more impressed if he were a penniless defence counsel who won his cases against the odds.I've many times drawn attention to Sir Keir's past as a wooden-headed, hard-Leftist, revolutionary dogmatist. He doesn't actually disown this past, though nobody has ever properly questioned him about it. He's still an atheist, perhaps the flattest and most boring world-view known to man. It is empty of hope or depth, based on the view that the universe is nothing but a cosmic car crash in which nothing can therefore matter very much.Amazingly (to me anyway) he confessed before the election that he does not have a favourite book or a favourite poem. Some people say he was afraid of getting into trouble if he revealed such things. But I believe him. He acts at all times as if he has no imagination, and no poetry. It is in the imagination that we work out how our actions will affect others, and with poetry we surprise ourselves by finding out what really moves us.We also know he has an unfavourite work of art, a painting of Margaret Thatcher that so got on his nerves that he had it put in some (as yet unidentified) boxroom. This is in the same class as the leaden decision of his equally colourless Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to tolerate no paintings in the State Room in 11 Downing Street, except pictures of or by women.When he felt safe to do so, he used to call for the abolition of the monarchy, another crude and unpoetic opinion. Now that this position would lose him votes, he mumbles vaguely nice things about the monarch and accepts various honours from the Crown. But I haven't heard him say he actually prefers a constitutional monarchy to a republic. He has also followed the Blairite practice of displaying Union Jacks everywhere, in the hope that this will fool people into thinking Labour is a traditionalist, patriotic party. But what do you think he really thinks?And this is why he is making such a mess. He has long-term dogmatic aims – his Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, for example, is pursuing those with vigour and spite. But he only ever wanted to be Chief Commissar and Chief Bureaucrat. The ancient splendours of Downing Street, as the King's First Minister, as heir of Pitt, Wellington, Disraeli, Gladstone, Lloyd George and Churchill, mean little to him. He is an uninteresting man, scuttling about in vast echoing halls and chambers built for far bigger people.https://mol.im/a/13876179
Sue Hammond ● 34d13 Comments