What happened to the aphrodisiac of power? In the orbit of a male PM even the most heterosexual chap used to feel a tingle, not exactly of lust – if you want that sort of thing, turn to our excellent Femail pages – but of interest.
Usually a premier creates a forcefield. Prime ministers see such fascinating things. One gawps at their fingers, lips, suit trims, shoelaces and the imagination swims at the secret and gilded places they must have been.
Sitting a few feet to Sir Keir Starmer’s left during the liaison committee yesterday, one experienced no such feelings.
The only sensation, after an hour, was an incipient headache. And terrible tiredness. Jet lag-style fatigue. I started yawning like a Mexican.
Half an hour after the meeting ended there is still a bone-deep lassitude. I just had to knock back a can of ice-cold Vimto to try and turn the propeller.
Sir Keir drains you. That drab, rubbery language leaves your eyelids sticky with desire for sleep. The opacity of his expressions. The tedium of tone. An overwhelming greyness, from his scraped-back, jellied hair downwards. Jeepers, what a stodge.
How do his Cabinet members endure weekly exposure to those gamma rays of platitudinous ennui? Ian Murray, sacked as Scotland secretary in September, was complaining the other day about his demotion. He should be pathetically grateful to have escaped the nasal knight-mare.
Before the start we were told by the committee’s chairman, Dame Meg Hillier (Lab), that there were some sixth-formers in the room. Say what you like about the Victorians, they only sent their children up chimneys. Call the NSPCC!
Dame Meg’s all right. She shows flashes of independence. Swings that female vicar haircut from side to side and has the odd tilt. But not even she could rescue these proceedings.
By way of displacement activity I watched a couple of the sixth-former visitors. Two boys in school uniform. All pink-cheeked at the start, excited to be missing Monday afternoon lessons.
After ten minutes – during which Alberto Costa (Con) cited sub-sections of the ministerial code – the two youths wore the dazed expressions of bullocks numbed by a vet’s syringe.
Later, when Bill Esterson (Lab) was droning about the energy price cap, the lads were slumped in their seats, two cowboys after a Medicine Bow bar brawl.
Mr Costa bleated in a voice like Janet from Dr Finlay’s Casebook. He moaned about infractions of parliamentary protocol, presenting his accusations with the gravity of prosecuting counsel in a particularly nasty bestiality trial.
Here was a PM fighting for his political life, facing self-made recession at home, war in Europe, a crazy US president, an even madder energy secretary, a doctors’ strike and more, yet ‘wee Janet’ was blethering on about ‘paragraph 9.8 and paragraph 1.6 of the ministerial code’. Sir Keir lacked the wit to tell Mr Costa to toss his caber.
Things perked up briefly when Cat Smith (Lab) and Alistair Carmichael (Lib Dem) went into the attack. They described elderly, ailing farmers wanting to die by April to avoid the farms tax. Was this not an atrocious business? Sir Keir started drawing urgent squares on his notes.
He did not like it when asked if he had heard about such suicidal desperation among smaller farmers. ‘I’ve had conversations with a number of people who’ve drawn all sort of things to my attention,’ muttered Sir Keir. The farms tax was ‘a necessary consequence of the decisions we have taken’.
He threw his gaze away from Mr Carmichael, refusing to have anything more to do with the issue. Not just dull but also cold and cowardly.
Another moment he started drawing squares with his ballpoint pen came when he was asked about the doctors’ strike. He sniffed that the doctors had lost sympathy with the public. Just like him!
After 90 prosaic, soul-blunting minutes he plodded off to Berlin. It is some years since my Deutsch days but I recall the expression ‘was fur ein schrecklicher Langweiler’.
