One had the handwriting of an eight-year-old, another bragged of his medical qualifications and a third claimed she had delivered a ‘generational shift in power’, even though she had just vacated the lowest of ministerial rungs.
Sir Keir Starmer is, heaven knows, no giant, but not since Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels has a man been assailed by such conceited tiddlers.
In Swift’s satire the vertically challenged people of Lilliput (6in tall) tie Lemuel Gulliver to the ground with strands of thread and prick him with their tiny bows and arrows. The Lilliputians are small, peppery, prideful little squabblers who squeak with self-importance.
Scores of Lilliputian Labour MPs took to social media on Tuesday to denounce Sir Keir. Many did so with ‘a heavy heart’ while expressing ‘regret’.
Oh, please. We all know they were doing so out of naked self-interest. They either thought a different leader might promote them or they were worried Sir Keir will lose them their £100k-a-year parliamentary seats. It may have been a legitimate flexing of parliamentary politics but please spare us the ‘heavy heart’ baloney.
Prominent among the little people was Jess Phillips (Birmingham Yardley), who has never been short on self-regard. She quit as safeguarding minister and did so with a resignation letter that contained – aieee! – a photograph of her own fair mug.
‘I want to start by first saying,’ began the gasbag tautologically. Her chief gripe was that Sir Keir had hesitated to meet her for stand-up arguments. Can you blame him? ‘I think you are a good man fundamentally,’ she droned loftily.
Ms Phillips’s prose style was a little unnerving. You could never be quite sure where one clause ended and another began. Some sentences ran away with themselves and her use of commas was ill-disciplined. Towards the end, they were being dropped into the mix like currants into spotted dick. The letter read as if it had been dictated, or perhaps composed with the help of artificial intelligence. She could do with the help of an editor – and now a careers adviser.
Jess Phillips’s letter read as though it had perhaps been composed with the help of artificial intelligence
One rule of ministerial resignations is to go early, before your rivals beat you to it and pinch the publicity. Miatta Fahnbulleh was minister for ‘devolution, faith and communities’. Even some politics reporters had never heard of her. But now they have done because she was the first understrapper to detonate her handbag.
In her resignation letter she announced to a mystified world that she was ‘proud’ of her achievements in office. They had been ‘transformational’ and ‘critical’. This obscure figure lectured Sir Keir about his ‘mistakes’ and informed him that, ‘you, prime minister, have lost the trust and confidence of the public’. Ms Fahnbulleh (private school, civil service, the think-tank world) represents Peckham, whose previous MP was Harriet Harman. They do pick ’em.
Things started to unravel for Sir Keir over the weekend when he was attacked by a disgraced ex-minister, Josh Simons, who once ran the journalist-smearing campaign group Labour Together.
Posh Josh, 32, owes his political career to Sir Keir but having slipped off the ministerial greasy pole as a result of his own ineptitude he hurriedly piled in on the nasal knight. He did so, furthermore, while talking about his own ‘humility’ and the ‘courage’ he and others were going to need to dump their leader.
‘We must ditch sharp-elbowed positioning,’ averred this shameless careerist, while spouting some tooth-rot about how he lives his life according to a motto of FD Roosevelt. Bungling backbencher or aphorising moraliser from the Reader’s Digest?
Jas Athwal (Ilford South) joined the throng. If his name is familiar it may be because he’s the Labour MP who has been described as a slum landlord because some of his numerous rental properties are mouldy dumps.
Josh Simons was one of those who hurriedly piled in on Sir Keir
As Mr Athwal denounced Sir Keir’s ‘mistakes’, we can be sure he was not simply taking revenge for those annoying new laws on rogue landlords. And what about Catherine West, the Aussie who threatened to stand against Sir Keir herself? She was ditched last year as a foreign office minister. Not that it could possibly have played any part in her considerations. Noooo.
Rebellions give unknown MPs a chance to appear on the telly. Folkestone’s Tony Vaughan, a fancy pants London lawyer, was delighted to address the nation on Channel 4. A chap called Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes N) was given top billing by Sky News. ‘Senior MP calls for Starmer to go’ cried Sky. ‘Senior MP’? Mr Curtis has been in the Commons less than two years. He is 32. He has spoken rarely, and inexpertly at that, in the chamber. ‘Senior MP’, indeed!
Sam Carling, a Cambridgeshire MP, is even more junior. Bookish Sam is just 23 and felt the need to place his signature at the bottom of his demand for Sir Keir to quit.
What a signature it was, with a little loop at the bottom of the ‘S’ and the letters scratched out as if in primary-school crayon. Are we governed by eight-year-olds?
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The reasonable observer will argue that at least these MPs were listening to the public and giving Downing Street feedback from their constituencies, which is as it should be.
One’s beef is not with that. It is with their eagerness for publicity and the tone of sanctimony laced with humbug which was rooted in their reluctance to admit that Labour’s failures are as much to do with Left-wing policies as the PM’s personality.
Sir Keir is indeed a floater – the Mail has been saying as much for years – but he himself is not the only problem. Voters who opted for Reform last week by and large think the government needs to tax less, spend less (except on defence) and make the best of Brexit rather than crawling back to Brussels. The rebels never mention such things, do they?
‘I have nothing but respect for Sir Keir Starmer,’ averred Plymouth Moor View’s Fred Thomas, before calling for the calamitous booby to resign.
Paul Foster (South Ribble) wrote that Sir Keir ‘deserves genuine thanks’ but still thought he should be axed. That use of ‘genuine’ is very modern-British, steeped in insincerity.
The City of Durham’s Mary Kelly Foy said: ‘I have decided to give my honest opinion.’ Does she not always do that? Eleven windy paragraphs followed.
Morecambe’s Lizzi Collinge came over a bit Oscars-night, sobbing: ‘I love our country and I love the people in it.’ Polling from Lancashire suggests that the ardour may not be reciprocated.
‘I love our country and I love the people in it,’ said Lizzi Collinge
And then we had Glaswegian MP Zubir Ahmed. Oh boy. He threw in the scalpel as a junior health minister, doing so with a letter to Sir Keir that kept reminding us he was a surgeon.
Having opened with the routine ‘it is with a heavy heart’ guff, Mr Ahmed dwelt on his many achievements (as he saw them) in his mere eight months of office.
‘As I lift my gaze,’ wrote this Homer of quacks, ‘it is clear to see that whatever the magnitude of individual achievements’ – (i.e. MINE!) – ‘they are now being dwarfed and undermined by a lack of values-driven leadership’.
One of life’s modest Herberts, he claimed he had been ‘guided by the principles of precision, clarity, candour and above all else an aspiration for excellence’.
Grammar not so hot, mind you. He spoke of Sir Keir ‘imbibing in us all a sense of national duty’. He meant ‘imbuing’. Imbibing is boozing.
There possibly wasn’t much levity in No10 on Tuesday night but when that letter from Zubir Ahmed arrived I bet they had a good laugh. What a pompous prat!
